Top 180 David Epstein Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been.”

— David Epstein

152. “Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.” Labor.”

— David Epstein

153. “I will not intercept your decisions that belong in your chain of command, but I will give and receive information anywhere in the organization, at any time. I just can’t get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.”

— David Epstein

154. “Weick saw that experienced groups became rigid under pressure and “regress to what they know best.” They behaved like a collective hedgehog, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone, as if trying to will it to become something they actually had experienced before.”

— David Epstein

155. “In product development,” Taylor and Greve concluded, “specialization can be costly.”

— David Epstein

156. “Interestingly, if the researchers used only the single film that the movie fans ranked as most analogous to the new release, predictive power collapsed. What seemed like the single best analogy did not do well on its own. Using a full “reference class” of analogies – the pillar of the outside view – was immensely more accurate.”

— David Epstein

157. “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

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

— David Epstein

159. “Almost none of the students in any major showed a consistent understanding of how to apply methods of evaluating truth they had learned in their own discipline to other areas.”

— David Epstein

160. “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

161. “InnoCentive solvers rate problems on how relevant they were to their own field of specialization, and found that “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.”

— David Epstein

162. “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

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

— David Epstein

164. “Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common, and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational-poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

166. “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

167. “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

168. “I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident – a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress.”

— David Epstein

169. “Unquestionably, Yokoi needed narrow specialists.”

— David Epstein

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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.”

— David Epstein

173. “The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.”

— David Epstein

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Ukrainian boxer Vasyl Lomachenko set a record for the fewest fights needed to win world titles in three different weight classes. Lomachenko, who took four years off boxing as a kid to learn traditional Ukrainian dance, reflected, “I was doing so many different sports as a young boy – gymnastics, basketball, football, tennis – and I think, ultimately, everything came together with all those different kinds of sports to enhance my footwork.”

— David Epstein

178. “Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did.”

— David Epstein

179. “I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them.”

— David Epstein

180. “It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them.”

— David Epstein

181. “In the late 1960s, future Nobel laureate economist Theodore Schultz argued that his field had done well to show that higher education increased worker productivity, but that economists had neglected the role of education in allowing individuals to delay specialization while sampling and finding out who they are and where they fit.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

183. “My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all this other knowledge inherently.”

— David Epstein

184. “Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”

— David Epstein

185. “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

186. “If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”

— David Epstein

187. “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

188. “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

189. “When seeking innovation in knowledge-based industries,” they wrote, “it is best to find one ‘super’ individual. If no individual with the necessary combination of diverse knowledge is available, one should form a ‘fantastic’ team.” Diverse experience was impactful when created by platoon in teams, and even more impactful when contained within an individual.”

— David Epstein

190. “In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”

— David Epstein

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

— David Epstein

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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