Name: Why specializing early doesn't always mean career success | David Epstein
Uploaded: 2020-11-05T20:20:16.000Z
Duration: 14 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transcriber: Leslie Gauthier Reviewer: Camille Martínez

So, I'd like to talk about the development of human potential,

and I'd like to start with maybe the most impactful modern story of development.

Many of you here have probably heard of the 10,000 hours rule.

Maybe you even model your own life after it.

Basically, it's the idea that to become great in anything,

it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice,

so you'd better get started as early as possible.

The poster child for this story is Tiger Woods.

His father famously gave him a putter when he was seven months old.

At 10 months, he started imitating his father's swing.

At two, you can go on YouTube and see him on national television.

Another that features in a number of bestselling books

whose father decided to teach them chess in a very technical manner

that with a head start in focused practice,

any child could become a genius in anything.

two of his daughters went on to become Grandmaster chess players.

So when I became the science writer at "Sports Illustrated" magazine,

then we should see that elite athletes get a head start

This is coached, error-correction-focused practice,

And in fact, when scientists study elite athletes,

they see that they spend more time in deliberate practice --

When they actually track athletes over the course of their development,

the future elites actually spend less time early on

in deliberate practice in their eventual sport.

They tend to have what scientists call a "sampling period,"

where they try a variety of physical activities,

they learn about their interests and abilities

and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.

"Gosh, that doesn't really comport with the 10,000 hours rule, does it?"

So I started to wonder about other domains

that we associate with obligatory, early specialization,

This is research from a world-class music academy,

and what I want to draw your attention to is this:

the exceptional musicians didn't start spending more time in deliberate practice

They, too, tended to have a sampling period,

even musicians we think of as famously precocious,

he just went through it more rapidly than most musicians do.

Nonetheless, this research is almost entirely ignored,

is the first page of the book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,"

where the author recounts assigning her daughter violin.

Nobody seems to remember the part later in the book

where her daughter turns to her and says, "You picked it, not me,"

So having seen this sort of surprising pattern in sports and music,

I started to wonder about domains that affect even more people,

in the higher-ed systems of England and Scotland.

In the period he studied, the systems were very similar,

except in England, students had to specialize in their mid-teen years

to pick a specific course of study to apply to,

whereas in Scotland, they could keep trying things in the university

Who wins the trade-off, the early or the late specializers?

And what he saw was that the early specializers jump out to an income lead

because they have more domain-specific skills.

The late specializers get to try more different things,

and when they do pick, they have better fit,

Meanwhile, the early specializers start quitting their career tracks

essentially because they were made to choose so early

So the late specializers lose in the short term

I think if we thought about career choice like dating,

we might not pressure people to settle down quite so quickly.

So this got me interested, seeing this pattern again,

in exploring the developmental backgrounds of people whose work I had long admired,

like Duke Ellington, who shunned music lessons as a kid

to focus on baseball and painting and drawing.

Or Maryam Mirzakhani, who wasn't interested in math as a girl --

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Why specializing early doesn't always mean career success | David Epstein

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