Top 180 David Epstein Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— David Epstein

55. “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

56. “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

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. “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

59. “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

60. “The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.”

— David Epstein

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.”

— David Epstein

64. “The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ’abstract thinking.”

— David Epstein

65. “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

66. “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

67. “I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”

— David Epstein

68. “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.” For him, firefighters were an example, and a metaphor for what he learned while studying normally reliable organizations that clung to trusty methods, even when they led to bewildering decisions.”

— David Epstein

69. “The “deliberate amateur”... “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,”... Be careful not to be too careful, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

71. “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

72. “It was a strong clue that one key difference between expert and novice athletes was in the way they had learned to perceive the game, rather than the raw ability to react quickly.”

— David Epstein

73. “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

74. “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

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

— David Epstein

76. “Netflix came to a similar conclusion for improving its recommendation algorithm. Decoding movies’ traits to figure out what you like was very complex and less accurate than simply analogizing you to many other customers with similar viewing histories. Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein.”

— David Epstein

77. “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

78. “In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”

— David Epstein

79. “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

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

— David Epstein

81. “Training without hints is slow and error-ridden. It is, essentially, what we normally think of as testing, except for the purpose of learning rather than evaluation – when “test” becomes a dreaded four-letter word.”

— David Epstein

82. “It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to.”

— David Epstein

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.”

— David Epstein

87. “Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful.”

— David Epstein

88. “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

89. “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

90. “In an age when alchemy was still a common approach to natural phenomena, Kepler filled the universe with invisible forces acting all around us, and helped usher in the Scientific Revolution. His fastidious documentation of every meandering path his brain blazed is one of the great records of a mind undergoing creative transformation. It is a truism to say that Kepler thought outside the box. But what he really did, whenever he was stuck, was to think entirely outside the domain.”

— David Epstein

91. “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

92. “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

93. “In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

95. “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

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

— David Epstein

97. “They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience.”

— David Epstein

98. “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

99. “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

100. “The fadeout was not a disappearance of skill so much as the rest of the world catching up. The motor-skill equivalent would be teaching a kid to walk a little early. Everyone is going to learn it anyway, and while it might be temporarily impressive, there is no evidence that rushing it matters.”

— David Epstein