YouSaid · the spoken record

David Epstein

lines on the record: 189
first: 2024-09-02
most recent: 2024-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That has an enormous influence on your cognitive ability and your productivity, like a 15% decrement, just because of things.”
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
“You can see how people perform on tasks when the music is on and when the music is off. And it's not as big a deal if the music is very familiar where you're kind of like. Not novel, so you're not attending to it the same way. But when I'm trying to be super focused now, I'll turn the music off. But if I feel my sort of motivation waning, then maybe I'll turn it back on. But I want to use it deliberately instead of just having it in the background all the time because it takes up a little space. And if it's real noise, like. Is a logarithmic scale, so small differences are actually a big deal. But if you go from, I think it's like maybe 70 to 80 decibels, that's like the difference of going from a Like a washing machine to a vacuum cleaner thereabouts in your background noise?”
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
“I mean, it's hard to say because I do it sometimes too because it can have an energizing effect or it can have a calming effect. And those are good, but it does take up brain space. So you have to balance those.”
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
“Overestimate how much we can get done in a given amount of time. So I'd say fewer things on your to do list, fewer things, and on the top, maybe even just one thing that's if I get this done, this was a good productive day, focus on that thing, you know, pay yourself first, do the important thing first, and really try to have some when you're trying to be focused. It's important to mingle with people and exchange ideas when that's what you want to do, but when you really have to be focused to try to be in a place that says distraction free as possible. And unfortunately, that includes even turning down or off music, even though it's pleasant and can help your affect and can motivate, but it also does have an impairment on cognitive function because you are paying attention to it to some degree.”
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
“I would again not start your day with something that is inherently a multitask. So if you cannot start with email, I would not start with it because I view that, at least for me, as something that We'll start the day with multitasking and we'll always feel unfinished, like never feel like it's finished. Blockout times where you designate on your calendar that this is the only thing that you're doing and leave some buffer for it because there's something called the planning fallacy. We always”
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
“She has done that. She's hooked people up at big organizations too, like inside Microsoft and places like that, where people are wearing heart rate variability monitors, everything they're doing is being tracked. In the old days, she was like sitting behind people with a stopwatch, but technology obviously progressed from then. And I think that's a surprising aspect of it. One of the reasons that email makes people so stressed is because it leads them to do this constant. I think in one of her studies people were checking email, office workers were checking email an average of 77 times a day. That's a lot of switching when you're switching in and out of email. And that just turns out to be a stressful thing because switching actually takes place in two kind of phases where the first phase is shutting down what you are doing. And the next phase is activating the rules for the next task. So even if you kind of think you're doing the same thing, like you're working on focused writing, but you're also in a Slack channel or something with a friend or college.”
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
“And it impairs your performance and it's stressful. That's been the most surprising part to me is that when people are heart rate variability is measured and some immune parameters, that when people switch a lot, like if you just saw how many times people switched their task, you know, email to this other thing, to some notification over a day, you'd have a pretty good bet at predicting their stress level and their performance level over the day.”
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
“Yeah, it's a, right, I think the differences between doing a bunch of things sort of over your career, over your life, or a span, and attempting to do a bunch of things at once. We can't technically do a bunch of things at once. We don't really multitask. We don't have the capacity to do it. We're actually just toggling between things really quickly. And it's been shocking to me to look at the research how big of an impairment that is for people's performance, particularly because it takes time to switch. And so you're not, again, the scientist Gloria Mark, who I think has been at the forefront of study of attention, describes your brain as like a whiteboard where you're doing something and to do something else, you have to erase, and that residue is left, and it's still going to be there when you move to the new thing for a while. And so you can't totally get into the next thing if you're interrupted.”
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
“Starting in this sort of information age period, particularly 80s and accelerating forward, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to access information more broadly. And the most impactful patents started to be authored by teams that include individuals who have worked in a whole number of different classes, and they're often merging things from different areas for invention.”
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
“Technological joke in every way. It's like the processor was a decade old. The screen looks like rotting alfalfa or something. It's like, and it came out at the same time as color competitors and it blew them out of the water because he knew what customers cared about wasn't color as much as it was durability, affordability, portability, battery life, game selection by using well-known technology people could make games quickly. And so he kind of set this philosophy, this lateral thinking withered technology. That was his phrase, which means taking things that are already well understood and moving them somewhere where they're seen as invention. And that actually turns out to be more the norm than the exception in terms of technological innovation, particularly sort of later in the 20th century forward. Before that, it wasn't necessarily the case. Much of the 20th century, actually, the most impactful patents, if you look at patent research, were authored by teams and individuals that dove deeper and deeper into one area of technology as classified by the US patent office.”
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
“And so he went and he took some well known technology from the calculator industry, some well-known technology from the credit card industry and combined them and made handheld games, and those were a hit. That's what Nintendo, which was a found in a wooden storefront in the nineteenth century, that's what turned it into a toy game operation. So he moved from machine maintenance to developing toys and games. And his magnum opus was the game boy where”
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
“That started with a guy named Gunpei Yokoi, who was Scored poorly on electronics exams in university. And so he had to settle for a low tier job in the machine maintenance worker at a company in Kyoto that made playing cards with flowers on them, whereas his more prestigious peers went to big companies in Tokyo. And the company was in huge trouble. It had a diverse five who was going to survive. And he knew that he wasn't equipped to work on the cutting edge. That there was all this information available that maybe he could just look for technology that's already well understood and combine it in ways that his more specialized peers couldn't see.”
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
“Work doesn't next year doesn't look like work last year for most of us anymore. And in fact, Andrews Erickson, again, the guy who did the research underlying the ten thousand hour rule, when he eventually wrote a book, he said. He made this caveat in the book that said, 10,000 hours framework, it applies to things where we know exactly how to be good and a coach can watch you do it and correct everything that you do wrong. So it doesn't apply to most of these other things that most of us do, like computer programming and managing and entrepreneurship and all these other pretty big loophole, right? In those areas, you want this much broader toolbox.”
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
“with his hands, by touching their tongue, making the prediction they would get typhoid which would turn out to be correct, so it would reinforce the lesson that he was really good at prediction. That's a really wicked learning environment with the feedback he's getting is reinforcing the exact wrong lesson, right? But I would say most of the things that most of us are doing have feedback that tends to be delayed. Sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it's not. It's never as accurate as like I hit that golf shot and I see if it hooks or slices and then I change the club face and try it again. And so most of what most of us are involved in, increasingly, 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
“So let's say one of the examples that I love that he turned me to was in medicine. So there's a lot of areas in medicine where something is done and the person making the decision actually never learns of the consequence of the decision. Or I'd say like judges in some cases in like the criminal justice system are set up to have maybe the worst judgment they could have in some ways because they almost never get feedback. They have like very little, they can do whatever they want and they almost never get any feedback. But so in medicine, there was this one example in one of the studies that I thought was just interesting and illustrative where this physician became famous for being able to diagnose typhoid, this New York physician by feeling around palpating people's tongues, feeling around their tongues with his hand. And he could tell a week or two before they would even get it this person's going to get typhoid. And as one of his colleagues later observed, he was a more prolific spreader of typhoid than even typhoid Mary. He was spreading 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
“Chess, golf. In chess, the grandmaster's advantage is largely based on knowledge of recurring patterns. So you better have started studying those by age 12 or your chance of reaching grandmaster drops from about one in four to about 1 in 55. Also why it's relatively so easy to automate. Feedback is quick and accurate. Not a lot of human behavior involved. Work next year will look like work last year. On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments where patterns don't just repeat. They might fool you. Rules may change if there are any. Work next year may not look like work last year. And so whether or not people get better with this very in a predictable way with this very narrow practice depends a lot on where on that kind to wicked spectrum the task happens to be.”
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
“And he was interested in my critique of some of the research and I was saying, I'm really confused, you know, what are you working on now? I'm working through my confusion about this. Why do people sometimes get better with narrowly focused practice and why sometimes don't they? He said, oh, I've done, I've got the paper for you. And basically he referred me to this body of research about kind versus wicked learning environments. These are terms coined by a psychologist named Robin Hogarth. Kind is like next steps and goals are clear, rules repeat. It's based on patterns, repetitive patterns. Rules never change.”
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
“And I could not figure out how to reconcile these things. Why are they finding such different results? Again, I'm looking through for all these signs of, you know, bad data, not finding it. And fortunately, I gave a talk where I was doing some of the critiquing of the science underlying the 10,000 hours rule and the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, was there. And someone asked someone for my email address later, he followed up and invited me to lunch. And we go and have lunch. And I'm like,”
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
“This gets at a fundamental issue that maybe I should have brought up earlier, actually. And it has to do with how you characterize the different tasks that you're trying to learn. So there was a period where I was really confused about the research I was reading in building expertise because there were two camps of researchers, both led by eminent scientists, one that would study people doing sort of more ten thousand hours-y kind of approach, same thing over and over, and they would get better. And this other camp that would find, if people did that approach, not only would they not get better, they would often get more confident, but not better, which was a bad combination. And sometimes they would get even worse with really narrow focus.”
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
“The way to get someone to do really well in the test is to teach this a very narrow body of knowledge that they'll have to execute at the test. The best way to prepare them for math learning is to give them this much broader connection of ideas that will serve them later on. So again, this is like to me the theme on every page of range that would have made a crappy subtitle is sometimes what seems the best in the short term will undermine long-term development.”
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
“Challenge is solved, you're kind of From different sides. And your building's generalizable model in your head of how to approach it. I mean, My favorite, and I'd be the only person to say this, but my favorite study that went into range was this one, the one that surprised me the most, I guess, was this one that was done at the United States Air Force Academy, which is this amazing place for experiments because they get a thousand new students every year. Those students are randomized to math classes that all have the same test and same grading and everything. Then they are re-randomized the next year and re-randomized again. So you can get these huge experiments randomizing people to math classes. And they looked at 10,000 students and found that the teachers who were the best at getting students to do well on the test in their own class, in their own intro class, right? Teacher year one has students who score highly on their test. Those students go on to underperform in the subsequent classes, and teachers whose students sometimes rated them lowly poorly because they thought it was hard don't do as well on the test of first year, overperform in subsequent classes. And the difference.”
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
“I think, I mean, it seems to be, and this works for physical learning as well. I think this is one of the reasons why this if you want, why Futsal is like why like 90% of the best footballers grow up on Futsal instead of playing on full-size pitch, is that it forces you to, instead of doing using procedures knowledge, which is you learn how to execute this procedure over and over, you're doing making connections knowledge, which is identifying the structure of a problem and figuring out how to match a strategy to it. And so you're building this mental template instead of just an ability to execute this flexible template that can be applied going forward.”
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
“Progress is slower, they might be less happy because they don't feel like they're getting it. But instead of having to just execute a procedure, they're having to match a strategy to a type of problem. And when the test came along where everyone has to transfer to new problems, the interleave group blew the block practice group away. It was like the effect size was like taking a kid from the 50th percentile and moving them to the 80th just by arranging the practice in a way that made it more difficult.”
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
“Okay, so I don't know all the skills that go into DJing, but if there's a way to do it, you should try to, instead of doing the same skill over and over and over again. Well, let me give you a research example and then you can port it into DJing. So in a recent study, there were dozens of middle school math classrooms, middle school, sixth grade, that were assigned to different types of math learning, some of them randomly assigned. Some of them got what's called blocked practice. You give like problem type AAA BBB, et cetera. Kids make progress fast, they're happy, rate their teachers highly, etc. Other classrooms got what's called interleaved or mixed practice where instead of doing A followed by B, it's like you took all the problem types, threw them in a hat, and drew them out at random.”
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
“Often, I mean, but I guess there can be a case where something's so over your head that you're not learning anything, right? But these desirable difficulties are like one of the most famous ones is called interleaving or mixed practice. This is if you're training at something, you want to vary the types of process.”
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
“It's salient. I mean, this is what this is so one of this kind of quizzing where it feels hard because you should do it before you know the answer. It's something I wrote about in range called desirable difficulties. These are things that make learning feel less fluent. They are unpleasant. They may slow you down. Much better for long-term retention.”
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
“If you have to do highlighting versus flashcards, flashcard quizzing is much better. The generation effect is being forced to come up with an answer. Even if it's wrong, in fact, sometimes, especially if it's wrong, primes your brain to then retain the right answer. It's actually something called the hyper correction effect, where if you're really wrong about an answer, you're much more likely to remember the right answer once it's given to you. So if you're looking up a piece of information, I suggest you guess what it's going to be before you get the answer. It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, might feel bad to be wrong, but doesn't matter. You'll better retain it when you see the right answer.”
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
“Like read wise as a programming. I'm not like affiliated with them in any way. It's just a thing that I use where if I have highlights in Kindle books or ebooks, it will feed me back my highlights at intervals, things that I thought were important regularly. And that's taking advantage of what's called spaced repetition, where if you want to actually leave a space almost to the point of forgetting something, and then if it's brought up again, you're embedding it better in long-term memory. So this is for learning anything, spaced repetition, language learning, all this kinds of stuff. So you would think that you should just repeat a thing a million times as soon as you have it, and that's the best way to grapple onto it. That's not the most efficient use of time. It's actually to space it out. And quizzing yourself is a great way to retain. So there's something called the generation effect, which is if...”
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
“Absolutely. Absolutely. Use it as quickly as you can. Again, repetition, but fit it into your network of ideas. Like stop if you have to. Because you can read a ton, but if you're not kind of, and I think reading even things that you don't retain still change your sensibility at some level, even if you can't consciously pull up all of the ideas and statistics and so on. But for things that you really want to be able to access. Connect it to other things that you already know, and some what's called spaced repetition. Like if you can have a way where you come back to it at intervals. That'll be much better. So I use this.”
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
“Your semantic network. When you learn something, connect it back to something you already know. So like when you have these conversations, you probably have a better tendency to remember things where you say, you know, that reminds me of some other guest that either agrees or disagrees with something that some other guest said, and you've attached it. If you think of your brain as like the spider web, things are attached by threads. And if you vibrate one thread, it's more likely to shake these other ideas into your brain. So when you're learning something new, stop and try to fit it into your existing base of knowledge, if you want to return better.”
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
“Oh, to retain him information. Okay. For retaining information, one repetition and familiarity is important, right? So if there's something that's really important to you, you should reread it because the first time you go through, if you're hearing new things, new terms, you're using your working memory just to keep up, basically. So to put this in kind of a simple way, there's research where you look at school kids, and if they're given an essay about baseball, say, the kids that are deemed really good readers, and there are kids who are deemed poor readers, and the kids will do the worst on comprehension are the poor readers who don't know anything about baseball, but the kids who know about baseball but are not as good readers will still have better comprehension than the kids who are good readers but don't know anything about baseball if they only get to go through once because having some knowledge helps you fit into what's called your semantic network the spider web of all the ideas in your brain so one going back over things that can be taking notes whatever it is but when you learn something new try to fit it into”
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
“No, I mean, I love fiction writing. I took a fiction writing class years ago that I think really improved my nonfiction writing, got me out of a rut. But no, I mean, that's a big lift for me. I'm not sure I actually want to do that. But if I said something that was of no stakes, then it wouldn't be any fun.”
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
“Book of Small Experiments. Yeah, Dan Pink actually gave it that name when he saw it. Yeah, but it is my, I think of it the same way that I had a book when I was a science grad student. What's my hypothesis for what I'm trying to learn? How am I going to test that? And what did I learn from that test? Okay, after I'm working on a book right now, after I finish that one, I'll write a fiction book, which I've never done before.”
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
“I think I am sort of even though my academic background and my work is in the sciences, I view myself a big difference between how the world probably views me and I view myself is I view myself as much more of like a creatively artistically inclined person. So I'll come up with an experiment. You want to commit to experiments here on camera?”
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
“You know, if you want, you could use a commitment device, which is where you could commit to an experiment on camera here, and then you'll be accountable for running some experiments you might fail at, just saying if you want to. I'll do it if you do 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
“You go out for a jog and you trip on the curb or something, like you have to fail with something of consequence. And then your reaction to that can set a tone.”
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
“That people would learn from the lessons of the past. And one of the things he does in organizations when he goes in, because now he consults, is he goes around, he asks people, what are you good at that we're not using? And people always have an answer for that. And that leads to well, what's an experiment that we can run to try to use that thing that you're good at that we're not using? So I think that can be kind of a foundational question to help people set up some of those experiments. But also a big impact would be And this is a tough one you going ahead and failing in an experiment because that's going to set the agenda, right? But you would actually have to fail like this can't be.”
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
“I mean, I don't think I don't lionize failure for its own sake, right? It's just, I think it's inevitable if you're experimenting enough that you'll have some failure. But I think one useful thing to do, like a guy Love who's made a big impression on me named Ed Hoffman, used to be the chief knowledge officer at NASA. That's like after NASA had some disasters. Most everything they did was very successful, but obviously they had some high profile disasters. He was brought in because they were deemed not a learning organization. They weren't learning from lessons of the past. And he was brought in to help create a knowledge system.”
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
“Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can see, you can give people, one, you can do it in a workplace environment where researchers like Gloria Mark, for example, will be tracking everything from someone's vision to what they're doing on their computer to their heart rate variability and seeing how long it takes them to get back to a task, increased switching when there's like a residue in their brain so their rate of switching will go up. Some of their indicators of stress response will go up. Or in a cognitive task, they'll perform more poorly if there's something still stuck in their brain. So there's also sort of laboratory experiments where you give somebody something, don't let them finish it, give them a cognitive task. And you see, does it impair their performance if they weren't allowed to finish the thing that started before?”
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
“Not starting your day with email or messaging because We were talking a little bit before about this thing called the Zagarnik effect, which is this idea that an unfinished task leaves like a residue in your brain, basically, and makes it harder for you to fully transition to doing something else. And because I expect your various inboxes will always be an unfinished to ask, right? If you start the day with that, no matter what you do, the residue is going to be there for what you try to switch to next. So I'm not saying don't address your email, but I wouldn't start with it. I would the day before, what is the thing that if I get done tomorrow, it's going to be a good day and start with that before you do the things that might leave residue on your brain and start multitasking?”
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
“I at one point had when I was getting overwhelmed with some stuff, I had a virtual assistant for a little while and we would categorize like emails into list A priority B, CD, all this stuff. And eventually I realized that was empowering me to do a lot of low value things. I became efficient at doing things that I shouldn't be doing. So I was seeing this public email address of mine that when I was oblivious to it, I wasn't answering and I was fine. But once I knew it was there, I'm like, oh, I have to answer this, I have to answer this, I have to answer this. And so one important step for me was realizing that only the A-list is the stuff that's going to get done because I'm a limited person with a limited life. So one, I think it's maybe you do need to do all that stuff or you just need to be aware of it. But some of it is just, I think there can be a danger in someone who has a lot of support resources where they can lose some of the aspect of prioritization. Where you just need to say, this is the list that's important. Other things I might not get to. But for someone like you, I would suggest something like.”
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
“There's nothing wrong with sometimes watching YouTube and rocket. You get ideas from this kind of stuff. But 10 to-do lists is a lot of to-do lists. Get most of the stuff done on those to do lists? It's more.”
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
“Organizations and ecosystems that learn and adapt to a changing world. And the import-export business of ideas means you need to have information flowing through an organization. You need to have people doing different things, maybe people even moving teams here and there. So I always think of the engineer Bill Gore, who created the company or founded the company that created Gore-Tex, and he fashioned the company based on his observation that organizations often do their most impactful work in times of crisis because the disciplinary boundaries go out the window and people start, what can I learn from my neighbor, you know, and working together? Or does he like to say real communication happens in the carpool, which I think is a funny saying, but I worry about that with more hybrid and remote work, where you can't necessarily just rely on serendipity for people to be sharing these ideas in this informal way. And so I actually think we have to be a lot more thoughtful about setting up our own import-export business.”
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
“You know, Adam Grant, who I think we both know, he mentioned me called the Hippo effect, where it's like the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, I think, is the acronym, where they're signaling is really important for everyone else. So if you're not just giving lip service like, yeah, failure is good, but actually giving people that title, I think that's a great signal for your underwriting risk. You're underwriting risk for people psychologically, and you're creating what scientists who study sort of networks, like groups of teams call an import-export business of ideas. And this is one of the hallmarks.”
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
“You just settle into exploit at sort of a middling level, then you're kind of sacrificing your hot streak. So that was one of the things that came up for me. The other thing was this, you got to something, this idea of people not only doing things that might fail. And I think that's great that they have the title failure, right? Because you'll have 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
“And reliably, what precedes a hot state? He was looking at, I think it was like 26,000 film directors, artists, scientists reliably what precedes a hot streak is a period of exploration where they're trying these different styles. They're going broad. They're keeping a smaller team so they can be nimble. They're moving between teams. And then they find something and they drill into it. And if they're going to have another hot streak, they do it again. They zoom back out and they go to this explore, explore, explore, and then exploit. So they toggle between these modes instead of staying just in one. But the clear message of his work is that exploration precedes.”
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
“And balancing that, explore, exploit. And there's all these, of course, you know, these famous business cases like Kodak invents the digital camera and scuttles it because they're like, why would we disrupt our own business? But there was this fascinating work led by a guy named Dashin Wong in Northwestern who does like people will do career development studies looking at 20 people and he'll look at 20,000 people. So his work's just fascinating. And what he saw in this work with his colleagues was that people tend to have hot streaks in their careers. Their best work tends to come in clusters. Most people will only have one. Some people will have more than one if they're lucky.”
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
“This brings up so much stuff because the fundamental problem you're getting at here is one called the Explore Exploit trade-off. And so explores what it sounds like looking for new knowledge or new things that you can do that'll add value. Exploit is taking stuff you're already good at that you already know and drilling down on it. And this is like the fundamental challenge for people in organizations that get good is once they've find something they're really good at and they drill down in it, they tend to ditch explore 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
“When you have something that's very successful, that's hard. And so I would start thinking about what risks you're willing to take. And it doesn't mean it's a failure if something goes backward, right? If the views go down or whatever metric you're measuring on.”
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
“And then you make your next step based on that, right? And I think when you're so competent and successful in getting only tons of positive feedback for something, it becomes hard to take risk. And so I think that'll be a challenge for you because if you take a sufficient amount of risk, right, you want to be in your zone of optimal push. So for anything you're doing, if you're doing practicing whatever, physical skill, anything, if you're not at least like 15, 20% of the time failing, then you're not in your zone of optimal push where you're getting as much better as you possibly can. And I 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