‘If we thought about career choices like dating…’: David Epstein shares a wise thought

Epstein's findings as a science writer challenged the 10,000 rules as he observed that elite players tend to delay specialised, focused training, and instead learn broad skills and their abilities and interests

By: Lifestyle Desk

New Delhi | November 23, 2022 08:20 AM IST

3 min read

Here's what David Epstein has to say about the conventional methods of attaining success. (Photo: Pexels)

We have long been told many perspectives, ideas, and ideologies with regards to success. One of them, as investigative reporter David Epstein mentions at the beginning of his Ted Talk, is the 10,000 hours practice. According to this practice, “to become great in anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice, so you’d better get started as early as possible”.

He cites the examples of ace golf player Tiger Woods whose father handed him a putter when he was just seven months old. Woods could imitate his father’s swing at 10 months, and went on to become the world’s best golf player at 21.

But his findings as a science writer challenged the 10,000 rules as he observed that elite players tend to delay specialised, focused training, and instead learn broad skills and their abilities and interests. He refers to this as the ‘sampling period’, something that musicians, too, have. “The exceptional musicians didn’t start spending more time in deliberate practice than the average musicians until their third instrument.”

He also observed that even though early specialisers have a higher income than late specialisers, they also tend to quit their career tracks altogether because they started so early.

On that, Epstein says, “I think if we thought about career choice like dating, we might not pressure people to settle down quite so quickly.”

He goes on to give examples of people like Duke Ellington, Maryam Mirzakhani, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Shannon and Epstein’s role model Frances Hesselbein as “broad individuals” who initially look like “they’re behind, and we don’t tend to incentivise anything that doesn’t look like a head start or specialisation”.

“In fact, I think in the well-meaning drive for a head start, we often even counterproductively short-circuit even the way we learn new material, at a fundamental level.”

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He concludes the talk by alluding to an example by Freeman Dyson who said “for a healthy ecosystem, we need both birds and frogs. Frogs are down in the mud, seeing all the granular details. The birds are soaring up above not seeing those details but integrating the knowledge of the frogs. And we need both”.

The problem, Dyson said, is that we’re telling everyone to become frogs. “And I think, in a wicked world, that’s increasingly shortsighted.”

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