Top 180 David Epstein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”

— David Epstein

2. “Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still.”

— David Epstein

3. “Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task,” she wrote. “It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem.”

— David Epstein

4. “As NASA engineer Mary Shafer once articulated, “Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.” It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them.”

— David Epstein

5. “In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.”

— David Epstein

6. “Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts. It also allows us to understand that which we cannot see at all.”

— David Epstein

7. “Chunking can seem like magic, but it comes from extensive, repetitive practice.”

— David Epstein

8. “Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”

— David Epstein

9. “When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called “far transfer.”

— David Epstein

10. “Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”

— David Epstein

11. “NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.”

— David Epstein

12. “Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.”

— David Epstein

13. “No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors. – Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History.”

— David Epstein

14. “Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.”

— David Epstein

15. “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

— David Epstein

16. “Teaching kids to read a little early is not a lasting advantage. Teaching them how to hunt for and connect contextual clues to understand what they read can be. As with all desirable difficulties, the trouble is that a head start comes fast, but deep learning is slow. “The slowest growth,” the researchers wrote, occurs “for the most complex skills.”

— David Epstein

17. “This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.”

— David Epstein

18. “Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.”

— David Epstein

19. “Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are – their abilities and proclivities.”

— David Epstein

20. “Instead, she told me, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom, “First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

— David Epstein

21. “Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.”

— David Epstein

22. “Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing – whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me.”

— David Epstein

23. “Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.”

— David Epstein

24. “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home – Frances Hesselbein.”

— David Epstein

25. “Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.”

— David Epstein

26. “He emphasized that there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure.”

— David Epstein

27. “First act and then think... We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

— David Epstein

28. “Duckworth learned that the Whole Candidate Score – an agglomeration of standardized test scores, high school rank, physical fitness tests, and demonstrated leadership – is the single most important factor for admission, but that it is useless for predicting who will drop out before completing Beast. She had been talking to high performers across domains, and decided to study passion and perseverance, a combination she cleverly formulated as “grit.”

— David Epstein

29. “The progress of AI in the closed and orderly world of chess, with instant feedback and bottomless data, has been exponential. In the rule-bound but messier world of driving, AI has made tremendous progress, but challenges remain. In a truly open-world problem devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous.”

— David Epstein

30. “You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

— David Epstein

31. “Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training. All slow down learning and make performance suffer, in the short term.”

— David Epstein

32. “As Karim Lakhani put it after his InnoCentive research, a key to creative problem solving is tapping outsiders who use different approaches “so that the ‘home field’ for the problem does not end up constraining the solution.” Sometimes, the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.”

— David Epstein

33. “The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area.”

— David Epstein

34. “We fail... tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.“... knowing when to quit is such a strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.”

— David Epstein

35. “Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor and machine learning researcher, told me. “Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”

— David Epstein

36. “The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist.”

— David Epstein

37. “When all you have is a volcanologist, I learned, every extinction looks like a volcano.”

— David Epstein

38. “I know who I am when I see what I do.”

— David Epstein

39. “The same medicine should not be prescribed for every athlete. For some, less training is the right medicine.”

— David Epstein

40. “The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance. Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science. Kahan thinks it could be because they are better at finding evidence to confirm their feelings: the more time they spend on the topic, the more hedgehog-like they become.”

— David Epstein

41. “Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.”

— David Epstein

42. “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.”

— David Epstein

43. “Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science.”

— David Epstein

44. “The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist. It could work, but it makes for worse odds. Plus, while personality change slows, it does not stop at any age. Sometimes it can actually happen instantly.”

— David Epstein

45. “Kepler did something that turns out to be characteristic of today’s world-class research labs. Psychologist Kevin Dunbar began documenting how productive labs work in the 1990s, and stumbled upon a modern version of Keplerian thinking. Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new – and analogies served as the wilderness guide.”

— David Epstein

46. “In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new.”

— David Epstein

47. “Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.”

— David Epstein

48. “Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems, and Kepler was an analogy addict, so Gentner is naturally very fond of him.”

— David Epstein

49. “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.”

— David Epstein

50. “It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer’s disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer’s disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it’s a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.”

— David Epstein