Top 180 David Epstein Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.”

— David Epstein

102. “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

103. “Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.”

— David Epstein

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In.”

— David Epstein

109. “There is a particular kind of thinker, one who becomes more entrenched in their single big idea about how the world works even in the face of contrary facts, whose predictions become worse, not better, as they amass information for their mental representation of the world. They are on television and in the news every day, making worse and worse predictions while claiming victory, and they have been rigorously studied.”

— David Epstein

110. “For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run. If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, so that the test will be more difficult when you do.”

— David Epstein

111. “The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.”

— David Epstein

112. “Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy.”

— David Epstein

113. “Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted to complexity, and that has manifested in flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world. In every cognitive direction, the minds of premodern citizens were severely constrained by the concrete world before them.”

— David Epstein

114. “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

115. “Each time he got stuck, Kepler unleashed a fusillade of analogies. Not just light, heat, odor, currents and boatmen, but optics of lenses, balance scales, a broom, magnets, a magnetic broom, orators gazing at a crowd, and more. He interrogated each one ruthlessly, every time alighting on new questions.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

117. “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

118. “Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.”

— David Epstein

119. “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

120. “To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

— David Epstein

121. “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

122. “Making It to the Top in Team Sports: Start Later, Intensify, and Be Determined.”

— David Epstein

123. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”

— David Epstein

124. “In totality, the picture is in line with a classic research finding that is not specific to music: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

— David Epstein

125. “The gains are startling: three points every ten years.”

— David Epstein

126. “One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.”

— David Epstein

127. “The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.”

— David Epstein

128. “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

129. “The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.”

— David Epstein

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— David Epstein

134. “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

135. “The more we have invested and even lost... the longer we will persist in insisting it will all work out.”

— David Epstein

136. “When Northwestern and Stanford researchers analyzed the networks that give rise to creative triumph, they found what they deemed a “universal” setup. Whether they looked at research groups in economics or ecology, or the teams that write, compose, and produce Broadway musicals, thriving ecosystems had porous boundaries between teams.”

— David Epstein

137. “Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.” Like polymath inventors, Eastman and Cousins take ravenously from specialists and integrate.”

— David Epstein

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.”

— David Epstein

142. “Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

— David Epstein

143. “Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.”

— David Epstein

144. “It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”

— David Epstein

145. “What Ibarra calls the “ plan-and-implement” model – the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “ test-and-learn” model – is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image.”

— David Epstein

146. “Professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement,” the economists wrote, “on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.”

— David Epstein

147. “Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.”

— David Epstein

148. “When you push the boundaries, a lot of it is just probing. It has to be inefficient,” Casadevall told me. “What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.”

— David Epstein

149. “The overall experiment results went like this: the more hints that were available during training, the better the monkeys performed during early practice, and the worse they performed on test day.”

— David Epstein

150. “It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them. But there is an organizational strategy that can help. The strategy, strange as it sounds, is to send a mixed message.”

— David Epstein