Top 180 David Epstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”

— David Epstein

52. “Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.”

— David Epstein

53. “Each dark horse had a novel journey, but a common strategy. “Short-term planning,” Ogas told me. “They all practice it, not long-term planning.” Even people who look like consummate long-term visionaries from afar usually looked like short-term planners up close.”

— David Epstein

54. “In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons.”

— David Epstein

55. “We know that early sampling is key, as is diversity.”

— David Epstein

56. “Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The struggle is real, and really useful. “Like life,” Kornell and team wrote, “retrieval is all about the journey.”

— David Epstein

57. “The management and culture aspects of the Challenger and Columbia disasters were so eerily similar that the investigation board decreed that NASA was not functioning as “a learning organization.” In the absence of cultural cross-pressures, NASA had failed to learn, just like the subjects in Patil’s work who were placed in strongly congruent cultures.”

— David Epstein

58. “Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.”

— David Epstein

59. “The ultimate lesson of the question was that detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.”

— David Epstein

60. “It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for nonspecialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.”

— David Epstein

61. “As psychologist Ellen Winner, one of the foremost authorities on gifted children, noted, no savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field.”

— David Epstein

62. “Struggling to hold on to information and then recall it had helped the group distracted by math problems transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory.”

— David Epstein

63. “Being forced to generate answers improves subsequent learning even if the generated answer is wrong.”

— David Epstein

64. “And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old.”

— David Epstein

65. “The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been. That feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented.”

— David Epstein

66. “Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. According to Gary Marcus, a psychology and neural science professor who sold his machine learning company to Uber, “In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer. In more open-ended games, I think they certainly will. Not just games, in open ended real-world problems we’re still crushing the machines.”

— David Epstein

67. “Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions. I just had a feeling all along that there was something wrong with the culture. We didn’t have a healthy tension in the system.”

— David Epstein

68. “When the Game Boy was released, Yokoi’s colleague came to him “with a grim expression on his face,” Yokoi recalled, and reported that a competitor handheld had hit the market. Yokoi asked him if it had a color screen. The man said that it did. “Then we’re fine,” Yokoi replied. Yokoi’s strategy of finding novel uses for technology, after others had moved on, smacks of exactly what a well-known psychological creativity exercise asks for.”

— David Epstein

69. “A team or organization that is both reliable and flexible, according to Weick, is like a jazz group. There are fundamentals – scales and chords – that every member must overlearn, but those are just tools for sensemaking in a dynamic environment. There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge.”

— David Epstein

70. “InnoCentive works in part because, as specialists become more narrowly focused, “the box” is more like Russian nesting dolls. Specialists divide into subspecialties, which soon divide into sub-subspecialties. Even if they get outside the small doll, they may get stuck inside the next, slightly larger one. Cragin and Davis were outside the box to begin with, and saw straightforward solutions that eluded insiders with seemingly every training and resource advantage.”

— David Epstein

71. “Finland compared the surgery with “sham surgery” – that is, surgeons took patients with knee pain and a torn meniscus to operating rooms, made incisions, faked surgeries, and sewed them back up and sent them to physical therapy – they found that sham surgery worked just as well. Most people with a torn meniscus, it turns out, don’t have any symptoms.”

— David Epstein

72. “Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics” – that is, knowing a lot of patterns – “and have only a basic understanding of strategy.”

— David Epstein

73. “There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge. Even the most sacred tools.”

— David Epstein

74. “In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context.”

— David Epstein

75. “Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better,” Yale historian Paul Sabin wrote. “The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon.” As each man amassed more information for his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.”

— David Epstein

76. “I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.”

— David Epstein

77. “The professed necessity of hyperspecialization forms the core of a vast, successful, and sometimes well-meaning marketing machine, in sports and beyond.”

— David Epstein

78. “In the genre of modern self-help narratives, music training has stood beside golf atop the podium, exemplars of the power of a narrowly focused head start in highly technical training. Whether it is the story of Tiger Woods or the Yale law professor known as the Tiger Mother, the message is the same: choose early, focus narrowly, never waver.”

— David Epstein

79. “Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

— David Epstein

80. “In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”

— David Epstein

81. “The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.”

— David Epstein

82. “Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.”

— David Epstein

83. “Geveden, in his own way, was in favor of balancing the typical, formal process culture with a dose of informal individualism, as Kranz and von Braun once had. “The chain of communication has to be informal,” he told me, “completely different from the chain of command.” He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn’t feel right. He decided to go prospecting for doubts.”

— David Epstein

84. “If you want to know if your kid is going to be fast, the best genetic test right now is a stopwatch. Take him to the playground and have him face the other kids.′ Foster’s point is that, despite the avant-garde allure of genetic testing, gauging speed indirectly is foolish and inaccurate compared with testing it directly – like measuring a man’s height by dropping a ball from a roof and using the time it takes to hit him in the head to determine how tall he is. Why not just use a tape measure?”

— David Epstein

85. “The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”

— David Epstein

86. “The study conclusion was simple: “training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.”

— David Epstein

87. “Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.”

— David Epstein

88. “Just as it is in golf, procedure practice is important in math. But when it comprises the entire math training strategy, it’s a problem. “Students do not view mathematics as a system,” Richland and her colleagues wrote. They view it as just a set of procedures.”

— David Epstein

89. “Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.”

— David Epstein

90. “Godin argued that “winners” – he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain – quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”

— David Epstein

91. “When information became more widely disseminated,” Ouderkirk told me, “it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.”

— David Epstein

92. “Flynn’s great disappointment is the degree to which society, and particularly higher education, has responded to the broadening of the mind by pushing specialization, rather than focusing early training on conceptual, transferable knowledge.”

— David Epstein

93. “If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”

— David Epstein

94. “Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.”

— David Epstein

95. “While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases – as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part – we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”

— David Epstein

96. “The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that NASA’s culture “emphasized chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.” Once again, “allegiance to hierarchy and procedure” had ended in disaster. Again, lower ranking engineers had concerns they could not quantify; they stayed silent because “the requirement for data was stringent and inhibiting.”

— David Epstein

97. “In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine.”

— David Epstein

98. “There was also a “perverse inverse relationship” between fame and accuracy. The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong. Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

— David Epstein

99. “Uzzi and a team analyzed eighteen million papers from a variety of scientific domains to see whether atypical knowledge combinations mattered. If a particular paper cited other areas of research that rarely, if ever, appeared together, then it was classified as having used an atypical combination of knowledge.”

— David Epstein

100. “Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”

— David Epstein