Top 180 David Epstein Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— David Epstein

107. “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

108. “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

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

— David Epstein

110. “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

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

— David Epstein

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.”

— David Epstein

121. “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

122. “Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess – how to manage the little battles to win the war – is called strategy.”

— David Epstein

123. “So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use.”

— David Epstein

124. “At one point they morphed into standardized forms that had to be filled out. Monday Notes became one more rigid formality in a process culture. “Immediately, the quality of the notes fell,” wrote another official NASA historian.”

— David Epstein

125. “Hesselbein decided then that a community that valued inclusiveness should answer “yes” to the question, “When they look at us, can they find themselves?”

— David Epstein

126. “She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range;.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

128. “The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while deep learning is not. “When your intuition says block,” Kornell told me, “you should probably interleave.”

— David Epstein

129. “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

130. “That’s how it goes on the disorderly path of experimentation. Original creators tend to strike out a lot, but they also hit mega grand slams, and a baseball analogy doesn’t really do it justice. As business writer Michael Simmons put it, “Baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four.” In the wider world, “every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

— David Epstein

131. “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

132. “One of the issues with our field is when we’ve looked at activity, and what controls activity, we’ve forgotten that we know very clearly there are biological mechanisms that actually influence people to be active or not” Lightfoot says. “You can have a predisposition to be a couch potato.”

— David Epstein

133. “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

134. “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

135. “She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once.”

— David Epstein

136. “Do we really need to go through courses with very specialized knowledge that often provides a huge amount of stuff that is very detailed, very specialized, very arcane, and will be totally forgotten in a couple of weeks? Especially now, when all the information is on your phone. 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

137. “The broad truth is that nature and nurture are so interlaced in any realm of athletic performance that the answer is always: it’s both.”

— David Epstein

138. “When she compiled her findings, the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.”

— David Epstein

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “As the company grew, he worried that young engineers would be too concerned about looking stupid to share ideas for novel uses of old technology, so he began intentionally blurting out crazy ideas at meetings to set the tone.”

— David Epstein

143. “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

144. “The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”

— David Epstein

145. “The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.”

— David Epstein

146. “A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” 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

147. “Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams – they were less likely to produce a smash hit – but as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams: an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had collective experience across the same number of genres. Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.”

— David Epstein

148. “When I was a college runner, I had teammates whose drive and determination seemed almost boundless on the track, and nearly absent in the classroom, and vice versa. 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

149. “Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw.”

— David Epstein

150. “If you write an interdisciplinary grant proposal, it goes to people who are really, really specialized in A or B, and maybe if you’re lucky they have the capacity to see the connections at the interface of A and B,” he told me. “Everyone acknowledges that great progress is made at the interface, but who is there to defend the interface?”

— David Epstein