YouSaid · the spoken record

David Epstein

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189
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2024-09-02
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2024-09-02
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  1. “I mean, that's part of the reason I got interested in it because a question after range that people had for me was how do you know when to focus? Right. So it really very much came out of this question because eventually you get this broad toolbox. You have to focus it into achievement at some point, right? You don't want to just pinball forever, which is.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “But a lot of the alumni that came out of there realize that that was a problem. And so going forward, they would have lessons like, you're better off envisioning a customer even if it's the wrong person than none at all in just building something that's cool. Because even if it's wrong, you can learn that you were wrong by trying something. Whereas if you don't have one, you don't even have sort of a feedback mechanism for learning. And so it was spending some time with some of those alumni got me really interested in constraints. And I'm still putting together some of that writing. So I don't know that I can do it justice at the depth that I could if I'd already written it.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Sure not apple so much as another company called General Magic that was a lot of the team that designed the original Mac came to this company and it was like the hottest thing in Silicon Valley and they were going to build the iPhone. They had the idea, they had the vision like the drawings they have look like the iPhone. They had the team from the Mac. They had this incredible talent. They went public in a so-called concept IPO. They didn't have a product yet, but the idea was so hot that they were taken public. And long story short, it turned into a disaster because they had no boundaries. They had as much money as they wanted. They didn't have any customer in mind. Anything they thought was cool. They built it. And so the project just grew and grew and grew and grew and never found the focus to kind of turn into anything usable.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Stay open to it and don't assume that if something didn't come to you with like a flash of insight that you should just stop thinking.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Nothing wrong with sharing the idea, right? But if you're like trying to solve a real problem, I wouldn't stop at your first idea. Throw it out in the fit of discussion.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “And then that'll fuck that up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They touch themselves. And then also, we have to grow them when they arrive, which we didn't like. People who have done it. And it's not that you don't want those people, you just don't want only those people, and the tendency also is often to use the first analogy that comes up. You don't want to do that either. You want to like have a menu of possible solutions to look at because There's this thing called the creative cliff illusion. People think their best ideas and most creative ideas will come either quickly or not at all. And in fact, they tend to come later as you're trying to come up with ideas. Yeah. So, but our inclination is that it's like this flash of lightning and either it comes or it doesn't.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “You have only people with the same expertise, it's not much better than having one brain. What you want to do is come up with what's called a reference class where you sit down and you come up with as many structurally similar analogies from all sorts of different areas. Like this sounds kind of like this and this other thing. And they don't have to be as far flung as what I just did. But in the studies where people have more time, with each successive story you tell them, more people will start solving the original one, even though they don't know that they're related. And so, you want to get people together who are really different. Come up with a whole bunch of these, like this kind of feels like this look for which ones are structurally similar and you'll start thinking of possible solutions.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Doesn't matter. I'm giving you a very quick version. But the answer is you can arrange multiple low intensity rays around me so they converge at the focal point. So they go through my torso without damaging me because they're low intensity, but they converge at the right spot, making high intensity. And this is a very truncated version. If you were getting the real test, you would have had a lot more time and still most people don't solve it. So don't worry. It's called the Dunker radiation problem. This is a very truncated version of a large body of research that shows that when you're facing a novel problem, the number of solutions and the chance of coming up with a good solution are predicted by the number and breadth of analogies that your group can come up with. And what predicts that is the breadth of experience of the people in the group. So if you're facing a novel problem,”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Synchronize our watches and they converge there at the same time and they liberate the fortress or they capture the fortress, liberate the country. One more story. This one's a fire in a small town, in danger of spreading to neighboring structures. Fortunately, it's near a lake, so neighbors are coming and they're filling pails and bailing water on it. Not working. Fire chief shows up. She says, stop what you're doing. Everyone get in a circle, fill up your buckets, get in a circle around the fire on the count of three. One, two, three dampens the fire. And they put it out. Fire chief gets a raise. Can you save me now?”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Okay, because that's what all doctors look like. And I'm your patient, okay? And I've got a malignant stomach tumor. And there's a new type of ray or focused radiation that can destroy the tumor if it's at sufficient intensity. The problem is at that intensity, it will also destroy healthy tissue in my stomach. So how can you save me? Okay, while you're thinking of that, tell you a story. There was once this general had to capture a fortress to liberate a country from a brutal dictator, and he had plenty of enough troops to do it, and there were roads radiating out like wheel spokes from the fortress. But they were strewn with landmines, so if he marched all his troops down any one road, he'd suffer a lot of casualty. So he had the idea, let's split up in a single file lines, go to the different spoke like paths, and we'll”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “But you can see certain genes that are associated with novelty seeking with ADHD will apparently start to be like selected out once they settle. And it's more common when they're nomadic. And what that suggests to me is that these are things, this attentiveness to lots of different stimuli that are really important, have been important for us ancestrally and are still important. And so they're still here. They may be maladaptive if you're telling someone they have to sit still in a classroom for 10 hours a day, which I think is a difficult environment for anyone to adjust to. But I think to some extent, and I think this has happened sometimes in some companies that look for opportunities for people with autism where you say, okay, where is this adaptive? Where is this type of thinking adaptive instead of maladaptive?”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Not a lot, but I mean, I have read some of that work, and I do think something that's really important is the more different types of thinking that we can like get into a stew, the better off I think we all are. I mean, there are reasons why ADHD, like there's some, it's not a big body of work, but I think it's relevant where you can look at nomadic populations that then settled and you can see certain genes that are associated with, and these are small effects.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Highly unlikely. And AI just like changes the feel that you're playing in, right? And so I think experimentation, I think it's going to be even more important as people can't expect to be doing the same thing their whole careers anymore. I mean, there are threads that they can expect to carry through, but not the same exact thing.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Have to experiment. I wish there were a way out of that. I wish you could say this is the thing that's going to work for you. Maybe someday.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “But it's like you can see this curiosity develop when someone hits something. It's so engaging that they want to understand how to be better. They want to talk to other people doing it. They get so curious about it.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Learning how to do stuff in a gym that I take for granted. And then I realized, okay, I need to sort of walk this walk with her. And so we would try different things like running. She wasn't as into that. So then, you know, try some other thing, et cetera, et cetera. And finally, she found one kind of class and she comes home this day. We did this and then we did this. And it was so hard. Let me show you this other thing we did. I'm like, you found your thing. And the one problem was then when we were looking at moving states, we had to be within 15 minutes of that kind of class walking distance for any house that we were going to buy.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Flow is a tricky one because it's a lot easier. It shows up a lot more in people that are like surfing or painting than it does in some kinds of knowledge work. But I think when you... You get really engaged in something, you have a curiosity about how you can get better at it, what else you can learn next. So I think it stimulates this kind of curiosity that you don't see in people when they're just in something where they're kind of going through the motions. So you start to understand like when I remember when my then-girlfriend now wife, it was important to me, you know, for health that like both of us be lifelong exercisers, for example. And the first time we moved in together and I'm saying like, all right, we got to identify something that works for you. And I take her to a gym and drop her off and not realizing I have decades of”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “But when I used to run the 800 meters or now when I write books, if you ask me at any given moment, Am I enjoying this? Am I happy about it? You know, am I passionate about it? Sometimes, like, no, I want to throw my computer out the window. Are you crazy? But it's so engaging. It's so compelling and it pushes me in a way to learn that I can't do just on my free time. And so I don't think we have to think about just passion. Find something that is so incredibly engaging to you and then go from there.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “But what I think it shows is that how limited your insight into what you might want to do is based on the things that you've tried. Again, Herminia Barras, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. And so I think the biggest problem for young people is if they're sitting around introspecting to try to figure out what their passion is, go and try something. It's almost certainly not going to be the first thing. It may be. You may get lucky, but it's probably not going to be the first thing. So you should get going on that experiment process and start building a model of the world so that you can understand what your options are. And I also think the issue with passion and happiness is, again, I was talking about, I think it was before, I can't remember everything that was before the recording started and after.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “These young people are learning things about themselves in their early 20s, and they have no agency over career switching to match it, so they were just quitting. When the Army first didn't realize this, so they threw attention bonuses at people. And the ones who were going to stay took it, ones were going to leave left anyway, half a billion dollars taxpayer money didn't fix the problem.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And then some scientists were also officers decided to study the problem, and they said, we haven't gotten a grit problem overnight. We've got a match quality problem, right? When the army looked like the rest of the economy where it was more upper out and you faced the same kind of problems year over year and you could have a period of training followed by a period of working doing similar things. Was fine. It just mimicked the rest of the economy. Then you move into this, whatever you want to call it, knowledge, creativity, information economy. And people who can engage in creative problem solving and knowledge creation have tremendous lateral mobility.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “And that survey turned out to be a better predictor than were some traditional metrics of who would get through beast-like test scores and stuff like that. It also had some value for who would get through the military academy, as did some of those traditional metrics. But tons of those, like since about the mid-1990s, those very gritty cadets at West Point have been almost half of them have been quitting almost on the day that they have a five-year active duty service commitment after they graduate, and almost half of them have been quitting. And so the army at a certain point said. We've got a millennial grit problem, you know, like too much avocado toast, not enough mortgages, or like whatever.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “and it found that the grit survey the grit survey is a twelve question survey half the points awarded for consistency of interests, not changing what you're interested in, and half the points for persistence of effort or perseverance turns out to be a good predictor of who would get through this very rigorous orientation at West Point called Beast. Also, has some predictive value for who would graduate.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “In that process, ninety percent of the army cadets who went through that process changed their career preference. And this is just from a little bit of dabbling because you don't know what's out there. You don't know what the opportunities are. And it helped retention so people were more likely to stay if they find better fit. This is, I think, actually one of the really important things about. And I'll circle back to passion a little bit there, but. When we think about grit, right, which everyone thinks of as a think about this and the reason that the army made me think about it, my semantic network, is that the most famous grit research was done at West Point, at the United States Military Academy by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “The more things you try, you'll probably figure out the more things that you're interested in. I was just last week spending a little time. I was at the Pentagon spending some time with a lieutenant general who helped with a program they call talent-based branching there, where they were losing a lot of the people they identified as the highest potential were leaving the army. And they started this pilot program called Talent-based Branching, where instead of saying, here's your path, you know, here's your career path, get upper out, they'd pair them with sort of a coach-like figure and they'd have them dabble in like five different career paths a little bit, reflect on it with their coach, take some tests, how did this fit you? They have to keep track of the reflections in online portal, again, self-regulatory learning. Got to do it explicitly.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Yeah, no, I don't, first of all, I think losing the idea that it is, I mean, that's like the idea that there's like a single soulmate out there for you, you know? And I mean, obviously I found my single soulmate, but for most of the rest of you. There's a lot of things you might be interested in. In fact,”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Exposure is good. But yeah, and it's a little more equivocal, right? It's less of a prescription also. So when someone starts late, we think they defied the odds. This is amazing. And when someone starts early, that's a very easy example to emulate. And so I think a lot of it is about that ease.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I think it's about variability in your problem solving, which is why I think so many of the great footballers grew up on Futsal, where Footsall is with a small ball, soccer like game with a small ball. I think the Brazilian name is like football des Salo, which it means like football in a room, small ball stays on the ground, played in a small space, and kids will be playing on cobblestones one day and concrete the next day. And it's like in a phone booth, you know, at hyper speed. And so there's no one's drifting down the field and everyone's having to judge even if you don't have the ball. Pick up on body movements to try to anticipate what's coming next. I mean, the touches are about six times as frequent as in full scale football. And so I think it engenders a lot more of this sort of variability.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “And then that disappears at the top level. So it's not a good thing. So there's the relative age effect. That's one, or premature choosing. There's injury, which is we now see a lot of adult style overuse injuries in kids, and the main predictor of that is nine months a year of one sport and one sport only. So this isn't about less sports. There seems to be a protective effect of diversifying that is separate from just doing less, but actually balancing yourself out in some way. But then there's a skill learning advantage where it's similar to language where, you know, kids who grow up in a, like with multiple languages, they will often show a little delay in some of their language skills, but that delay is totally wiped out in the long run. And they have an advantage for subsequently learning other languages. Looks very similar in a lot of these skills where if you're diversifying, there may be some delay, but you have an advantage for picking up other skills later on. I don't think this is about whether you're putting on a basketball jersey or a football.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Premature optimization. Yeah And that's also why we often see on junior teams the relative age effect, you know, where. Just turned eighth has a huge difference of development in that age, and Coach mistake that biological maturation for talent? And so youth teams are overloaded with kids born early in their youth cohort and also in school, especially boys if they're younger in their age cohort are much more likely to get diagnosed with AAHD, but they're just acting like the younger boys that they are.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Ability and interests And the earlier you force selection, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot. So, especially when selection is way pre puberty. You're probably putting people in the wrong”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “For your perspective, child, I wouldn't say don't expose them to soccer. I think, because I think a lot of this isn't, I think there's a few things going. There are three buckets of things going on with why this delayed specialization works in sports. One is match quality, again, the degree of fit between who you are and what you do.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “History surprised even me where he took several years off to learn dance like I mean I wouldn't usually expect someone to take years off it's just sort of do things. In those same years, so that was amazing, but”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And I'm like, please don't let her ask a question. Of course she raises her hand for the first thing, and she goes. I think my father was ahead of his time, he had me do ballet, track and field, gymnastics, taekwondo, learned to throw a football for the overhand, snapping motion of a serve, when there was too much travel on the, you know, a youth tour, he took me off so I could focus on school. I've been a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and I had never heard that. I assumed that she was this kind of quintessential tiger story. So I think even those stories, when you look more deeply, they're not as clear-cut as we tend to think.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Problem is, as we talked about, golf is almost a uniquely horrible model of almost everything else that humans want to learn. It's like the epitome of a kind learning environment, where the situation isn't changing, you're not having to react. So I think it's a bad model. And we underplay, even for famous people, the normal developmental trajectory. I once gave a talk to a small group of people about some of this research in sports, showing that the typical path to becoming elite is with a sampling period. You learn a broad range of skills, learn about your own interests and abilities, delay specializing till later than peers. And Serena Williams sat in the second row, and I'm freaking out because you can present all the data you want, but if the goat stands up and says you're an idiot, it's going to be a bad day, right?”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “He went on to be every bit as famous as Tiger Woods. But even tennis enthusiasts don't usually know anything about his developmental story, even though it's the norm according to the science. We only tell the tiger stories, even though that one's the exception, right? And this is, why do we only tell the tiger story? This is part of the debate I've had with Malcolm Gladwell when we're running together. And he said, well, he told me, it's a human cat video. You know, you go on YouTube and see him at two years old and you got to share it. I think that's true. But I think it's also because it feels like this tidy narrative that we can extrapolate to anything we want to be good at in our own lives.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Reporter to hear the interview recording. Turns out he just said Mare CDs in Swiss German. He just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes, right? She was fine with that.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “On the other hand, Roger played a variety from sports basketball, rugby, skateboarding, soccer, mother was a tennis coach but declined to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. I guess didn't like deliberate practice. Kept doing, let's see, he did handball, he did some rugby, skiing, swimming, wrestling. When his coaches wanted to move him up to play with older boys, he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends after practice. And he was not focused on being the next great from an early age like Tiger was. In fact, when he became good enough to warrant an interview with his local newspaper, the reporter asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck if he ever became a pro, and he said a Mercedes. His mom was aghast, right? She thought this was like ghost or And so she asks the”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “He was at his father gave him a putter when he was 10 months old, when he was two. Just as a toy, he wasn't trying to teach him to be a golfer. He gave him a toy. As Tiger himself said, my father never once asked me to play. It was always me asking him to let me play. But that's ignored. But at two he was on national television. You know, you can go on YouTube, see him on national TV, showing off his swing. And then by three, he's saying I'm going to be the world's next great golfer. He's world famous as a teenager. By the age of 21, he's the greatest golfer in the world, right?”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “People who go on to the highest levels again, there are a ton of different paths, but they tend to follow the Roger path, not the tiger path. So Tiger Woods, we know, are very early specialization famously. Roger Fetter played a whole bunch of different sports, didn't specialize until later than some of his peers.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “You know, I'm not convinced that you are going to be like a vicarious living kind of dad. Maybe you'll turn out to be, but I'm not convinced. But let me tell you, you just reminded me of an interesting story where I was once giving a talk about some of this research in sports that shows that the...”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Well, I definitely do it when I'm in the process of writing a book because then all these things that I take for granted, I'm like, now I really got to lock in and be better. And I have a five year old son, and I was more of a night person who would work at night. Like I would do a lot of my writing in the wee hours. And he's getting up early, no matter what. And so I realized that I had to start being a lot more efficient about some of my schedule and started thinking a lot more about having it be dark, having it be quiet, having it be cool, not having the phone around. The last thing I'm reading, not being work-related, otherwise I'll be thinking about that and it'll take me longer to go to sleep. I think I became a lot better about it when I son came around.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Yeah, I mean, I wonder if there's some, I think our phones are really useful for certain things, and I think they are disruptive for other things. And I wonder if sleep is one of the most important. Don't really want to be like leaving residue on your brain when you're trying to go to sleep. So I would put the phone as far away as possible when you're really trying to sleep and not at the last minute either, personally. I leave it in a different floor and airplane mode.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Yes, you can see in studies where people are taking cognitive tests if they have their phone, visible, even if it's off. The people who are more phone dependent are sort of more used to interruptions, they'll have a bigger impairment on the test if the phone is even like visible around them because they'll. Yeah. And so it's, you know, what thing did I forget to do? And I think something that can help with this is keep a pad nearby. And when that thing pops into your head of what you forgot to do or who you forgot to respond to, write it down so at least it's maybe that helps it not stick in your mind where you're trying to hold it in working memory like cognitively outsource it so at least it's not sitting in there and I think that can help the adjustment”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “You will start self interrupting to maintain the cadence of interruptions to which you have become accustomed, right? As if we have some internal distractometer that is saying, this is your normal cadence of interruption, I'm going to continue it by popping into your brain. Oh, here's this thing I need to check. Oh, here's this person I didn't respond to. You'll self-interrupt. That will go away, but not immediately. So if you want to have a lower cadence of interruption, you need to like build by getting rid of those external interruptions, know that you're going to be self-interrupting for a while. And that'll go down more slowly. So it has to be more habit formation instead of just today I shall be, you know, uninterruptible.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Yeah, yeah, this is So, this is another aspect of Dr. Mark's work where she found that we have this kind of internal mechanism where if you're getting distracted all the time by notifications or whatever it is and switching a lot, if you say, well, now I really have to hunker down, I'm going to get rid of the notifications or whatever this stuff is.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “So push the distractions out. But there's also times to be pleasant. I think part of what's sensible is working in intervals, planning to work in intervals. Focus hard for a little while. Do the Maya Angelou, then switch to your little mind where we're doing something that's sort of more fun and refreshing and maybe let to incubate for a few minutes also. Take a shower, take a walk, you know.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Pushing yourself, right? Like, I don't know if you've ever been on a, there was a time where I was trying to, you know, do some foreign language lessons that I was listening to while I would be running. And if I started hitting it hard while I was running, I couldn't even remember what was said because it's you switch into being really focused, right? And so I think it depends. If you're pushing yourself all the way you need everything, like there are times when I'm writing where I'm trying to balance a lot of ideas in my head and I almost feel like I'm overheating a little bit. And when I'm in that phase, I want every advantage I can have.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “I mean, I think that's going to be better, right? The less novelty there is for you to attend to, that's better. But I think it's also worth trying it with nothing. And it depends how much you're pushing yourself, right? Like a tiny, an improvement of motivation or your affect or feeling good might be worth it if you're not. All the way at the edge.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Focus is a challenge because this is not the situation that we evolved in, right? We evolved in a situation where paying attention to novel stimuli is a really good thing. And sometimes it's still a very good thing. But it's at odds with a lot of these modern things that we're trying to do that are pretty new tasks for people.”

    2024-09-02 · The Diary of a CEO · David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT