This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Episode Intro#
Hello and welcome to Graduate Theory. Today I’ve got a little bit of a different episode for you. An interesting thought exercise about careers is how to maximise your career potential. Some problems that we have when we start our careers are things like: how do I know if what I’m doing is what I’m meant to be doing? Am I doing something that is really matched to my skill set? Am I going to maximise my potential by doing this thing long into the future?
There are a lot of schools of thought and ways of approaching this problem. In today’s episode, we’re going to explore what we can learn from them and apply to our careers, so that we can plan more effectively and make better decisions about which industry and role to pursue. We’re starting with the idea of a hill climb.
Then we’re going to look at the 10,000 hours rule and how that applies, before finishing with range and how it underpins many of the concepts we’ll discuss in today’s episode. There’s a lot of value in this episode.
There are a lot of great takeaways that can help you plan your career and decide which industry and type of job to pursue. Let’s get started with this idea of the hill climb.
I’ve mentioned it before. A hill climb is essentially: imagine we’ve got lots of hills, and we want to climb to the highest hill. To explain this better, we’ve got Chris Dixon who’s going to explain this concept of a hill climb.
Chris Dixon on Hill Climbing#
Chris Dixon: Number two: don’t climb the wrong hill.
I speak a lot to young people who are thinking about joining startups and trying to recruit them. And I see a very common pattern, which is people get stuck in fields that they don’t like because they feel like they’re making incremental day-to-day progress. I think a good analogy for understanding this concept is one that comes from computer science. It’s known as hill climbing algorithms.
To describe this briefly, imagine a landscape, a hilly landscape with various tall hills and shorter hills, where your goal is to find the highest hill. And that might be whatever your personal goal is.
What tends to happen, I think, especially with ambitious people, is that the lure of taking a step upward on the current hill is very strong and it’s very hard to step back and go and explore and look at other hills. What computer science teaches you is the optimal algorithm for finding the highest hill is to meander, explore a lot, especially early on, occasionally drop yourself into random places around the terrain.
And when you find the highest hill, pursue it, no matter how attractive the upward step of the current hill might appear.
The Two Approaches to Finding and Climbing ‘Hills’#
We can split the hill-climbing analogy into two key things. The first is finding the hill: which one are you going to climb? Let’s try to find the hill with the highest peak. As Chris said, the peak represents whatever our goal is for our career. It might be money, status, happiness or fulfilment. The first part is working out which hill is the highest and how to find it. The second is climbing the hill itself.
One approach to climbing the hill that has become popular in recent years is the 10,000 hour rule. It says that if you pursue something for 10,000 hours, you will eventually become world-class at it.
And you’ll have the rewards associated with that. This idea was first popularised by Malcolm Gladwell. And we’ve got him here to explain that for you.
The 10,000 Hour Rule#
Malcolm Gladwell: This is something I spend a lot of time on in Outliers: this notion of how long it takes to be good. A lot of psychologists have examined this question and discovered something.
The 10,000 hours rule says that when we look at a wide variety of cognitively complex activities, we find a very consistent pattern: it seems impossible to achieve true expertise unless you have practised for 10,000 hours. If you think of that as four hours a day, 10,000 hours is 10 years.
The 10-year rule shows up in almost everything. For example, chess grandmasters. There’s only ever been one chess grandmaster in history who has achieved that level without having played chess for 10 years. And that was Bobby Fischer, who became a grandmaster after nine years. You can take lovely studies of classical music composers.
You take them all and you see what is the first piece of music they wrote that was truly great, that was one of their signature pieces. And it has never been the case that a truly world-class piece of classical music has been composed before the composer was composing for 10 years. And people always say, “Well, what about Mozart?”
Well, was Mozart composing at 10 and 11 years old? Absolutely. Have you ever listened to the things he was composing at 10, 11? They’re terrible. He wasn’t any good until he was 23 and wrote concerto number 9 in E flat.
The Problem with the 10,000 Hour Rule#
So the core understanding and learning that we get from listening to Malcolm talk about the 10,000 hour rule is that if we want to achieve really high levels of success in a certain area, we need to be really focused on one thing for 10,000 hours. And this is roughly about 10 years of working on just that thing.
So the examples he gave were in music. Certain musicians had been working on their craft at least 10 years before they produced something that was truly incredible. And how do we apply this to careers? Well, perhaps according to this methodology, it’s going to take 10 years in your job.
So whether you’re a programmer or an analyst or whatever, it takes 10 years for you to become world class at that thing. Is this the right approach? And does the 10,000 hour rule apply across these fields like music and chess into something that is a little bit less well-defined, like work?
It’s interesting to think about because there is certainly some merit to it. If you’re going to do the same thing for 10 years, you’re going to be good at it. But I want to follow Malcolm’s piece with some pieces from Bill Gates and Tim Ferriss, who have some interesting comments on the 10,000 hour rule.
And we can start with Bill Gates and hear his thoughts. And then we’ll hear from Tim.
Bill Gates on the 10,000 Hour Rule#
Bill Gates: If somebody reads the book to say that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something you’ll be super good at it, I don’t think that’s quite as simple as that. What you do is you do about 50 hours and 90% drop out because they don’t like it or they’re not good.
You do another 50 hours and 90% drop out. So there’s this constant cycle. And you do have to be lucky enough, but also fanatical enough to keep going. And so the person that makes it to 10,000 hours is not just somebody who’s done it for 10,000 hours. They’re somebody who’s chosen and been chosen many different times.
And so all these magical things came together, including who you know and the timing. That’s very important when you look at somebody who’s good and ask, “Could I do it like them?” They’ve gone through so many cycles that it may fool you into thinking that, yes, you could—with the right luck, imagination and some talent.
So what I pick up from what Bill Gates said was some things around how 10,000 hours is a nice way of packaging this, but really if you’re going to spend 10,000 hours doing something, you probably have some high level of interest in it. People might stick it out for a certain amount of time, but then they’re just going to drop off and pursue something else.
And it says more about them and their interest and their skills and abilities in this thing to just persist for that long, rather than it just being a simple number and that anyone can do it.
So I think it’s interesting now to hear what Tim Ferriss has to say. Again, he has some interesting thoughts and critiques about the 10,000 hour rule.
Tim Ferriss on the 10,000 Hour Rule#
Tim Ferriss: If you are, through God-given skill, capable of becoming the best in the world at X, I feel people typically know this early on. If you’re Tiger Woods, instead of drawing pirate ships, you’re drawing trajectories of different irons.
I’m not kidding. I saw this drawing. That’s not normal. But for most people, I feel they have the capacity to be exceptionally good—in the top 5% in the world—in many different areas. They may not have, or be able to identify, the raw attributes that are going to push them into bobsledding, because there are only so many things you can try. I could try to become perfect in Japanese, which of course will never happen because I won’t be perfect in English. Or I could get to the point where I can converse like this in perhaps 20 languages by the end of my life.
And it’s just more appealing.
I thought Tim’s comments were really interesting. Most people can be pretty good at most things; it’s about deciding which ones. We can’t sample everything, so we have to pick a few. I also liked his point that you know early on if you can become the best in the world at something.
It’s something that he personally is not really interested in doing. With the language example, he’d rather be conversational in many languages than a deep specialist in one language.
I thought that was an interesting idea: being good at many things rather than exceptionally good at one. That’s what we’re going to talk about now—the idea of range, which partially runs counter to the 10,000 hour rule.
We’ve previously discussed music and chess and how people that are successful in these fields have been working at them really hard for 10 years.
What we’re going to talk about now is more of a Tim Ferriss approach, where instead of being really good at one specific thing, we’re going to be reasonably good at more things and see how that approach plays out. Someone who has done a lot of research on this idea of range is David Epstein. He has a book called Range. It’s a fantastic book, one of my favourites, and I’ve mentioned it in some of my podcast episodes. We’re going to hear from him in a second, and he’ll explain this idea and how he thinks about it.
And it really is one of the main examples that he uses to describe this idea.
Range - The Tiger v Roger Problem#
David Epstein: Okay, so I’ll lay out Roger versus Tiger because there’s a beautifully simple way of illustrating this argument.
So Tiger Woods—probably even for people who don’t know his story, you’ve probably absorbed at least the gist of it. Seven months old, his father gives him a putter, not trying to train him to be a golfer, but just gives him a putter. He starts carrying it around in his baby walker. At 10 months, he starts imitating a swing.
He was physically precocious. At two years old, he’s on national television. At that age, the CDC development benchmarks are “stands on tiptoes and kicks a ball”, and he went on television and showed off his driving in front of Bob Hope. By three, his father was media training him. At four, he started hustling people. He’s famous as a teenager. By 21, he’s the greatest golfer in the world. Roger Federer has perhaps the most famous development story in the history of anything.
Roger Federer, meanwhile, played about a dozen different sports: skiing, skateboarding, badminton, tennis, basketball, soccer, all these things. His mother was a tennis coach, refused to coach him because he wouldn’t return balls normally. She said it was no fun. When his coaches tried to bump him up a level, he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends after practice. When he finally got good enough to warrant an interview with a local newspaper and the reporter asked him if he ever became a pro, what he would buy with his first paycheck, he said a Mercedes and his mother was appalled and asked if she could hear the interview recording. And he’d actually said “more CDs” in a Swiss German accent—he just wanted more CDs. And so then she was like, “Okay, we’re doing okay.”
His father had no rules. He just said, “Don’t cheat,” and didn’t care about anything else. Federer specialised years later, having continued to play badminton, basketball and soccer. He was in his mid-teens when he was really only playing tennis, and he still continued to play soccer and other sports informally. The question was: which one of these models is the norm? Which one should we extrapolate from?
There are some really interesting ideas there from David. The question he’s raised is important for us: which of these two scenarios should we extrapolate from and build our lives around? One common mainstream idea is the early-specialisation, 10,000-hours rule, where we specialise early like Tiger Woods. That may be too early, but he’s special. Luckily, he knows he’s going to be a golfer when he’s only a couple of months old.
Should we take this approach of early specialisation, or should we wait and follow more of the Roger Federer approach, where we play around with a bunch of different things and specialise later? It’s an interesting idea and one that I spoke about with Adam Ashton in episode 12 of the podcast. Here are his thoughts on range compared to the 10,000 hour rule.
Adam Ashton on Range#
Adam Ashton: For me, there was a real eye-opener in seeing the specialist and the generalist rebranded as going wide versus going deep. If you want to specialise in an area that is more like golf or chess, where there is a clear answer and a clear way to do it, the way to achieve success is to be the best person at it. That means working the hardest in that one niche field and going really, really deep. One book that links with this is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which discusses Anders Ericsson’s 10,000 hours rule: the violinists who had practised for 10,000 hours achieved mastery. If you want to go deep in something, get your 10,000 hours. Work really hard. Work more, learn more and achieve better things than everybody else. It also links with Grit by Angela Duckworth, because the path is going to be bloody tough.
You need a bit of grit to get through. You need to pick the right thing to go deep in and then use grit to reach those 10,000 hours. At the end of that journey, you become a master in your field and successful if that’s the path you choose. It’s a very viable path to success, but it’s not the only one.
I think a lot of people probably think that is the only path: to work really, really hard at one thing and become the best at that. But there is another way to achieving success, which is going wide, the generalist approach, which we see in books like Range, as I said, by David Epstein, and Originals by Adam Grant, saying that it’s not just the one who works the hardest.
Maybe it’s the one who’s done two years in this, three years in that, two years over here and another four years somewhere else. At the time, it looks like a weird path. They’re jumping between different things and learning different skills that seem unrelated, but at the end they reach a point where they find the intersection of all those skills.
They find the synergies and ways to stack everything together, so that they become the best in a niche at the intersection of all these different things—something nobody else could possibly do because they haven’t built up all the different skills. As you say, you’re probably a bit more biased towards that because that’s the path you’re on, and that’s definitely me as well. I think it holds a lot of merit. Just knowing there is a different path, rather than picking one thing and working really hard at it, is valuable. If you want to jump between different things, make sure you don’t simply quit something because you don’t like it, try something else, and then quit that too. You need intentionality around the different skills you’re building. You might seem like a failure at the start, but in the end you’ve stacked all these different things together to achieve your goals.
So Adam did a great job there breaking this problem down into the specialist versus generalist. So the specialist is the Tiger Woods, and the generalist is more of a Roger Federer type approach. And that’s not to say that the generalist doesn’t have actual skills, because certainly Roger Federer is still the best in the world at tennis, but he has more of that background.
Tiger Woods is still predominantly a golfer, whereas Roger Federer could probably play a few other sports and still be quite good. I want to dive further into the reasons this idea of range and having broader experiences can be a better approach than specialising early. There are quite a few, and we’re going to go through them now. The first is something David Epstein calls match quality.
And then we’re going to talk about how long-term success requires a broad base. So being able to succeed in the long term requires a broad range of experiences. And then last, we’re going to talk about short-term thinking and how this plays out in the context of range. So again, we’re going to hear from David a lot throughout, and we’re going to hear from Malcolm Gladwell as well, who’s the guy behind the 10,000 hour rule.
Applications - Match Quality#
And the first thing we’re going to dive into is this idea of match quality.
Let’s say I play soccer and don’t know which position I’m best at. Maybe I’m a good goalkeeper, defender or striker, and perhaps I start as a defender. A specialist approach would say that the best way to become a good defender is to play only as a defender, and that I’m not yet good because I haven’t spent enough time doing it. Alternatively, we can take the range approach: play a few positions and work out which gives me the highest match quality. I might play in midfield or score goals, then ask which was the best fit. Having experienced more variety and the game more fully, I can start to specialise and take one position more seriously.
I’ve seen what it’s like to be a defender, midfielder and striker. I can put my position in the broader context of the game, understand all the roles and work out where my skills are best suited. If I play as a striker and find that I can score goals easily, we’ve learnt that my skills and attributes are a strong match for that position. Sampling allows me to work out which position I’m best at, and we can go from there.
And so this is the first thing we’re going to talk about. And David has his explanation on this here.
David Epstein: Having seen this surprising pattern in sports and music, I started to wonder about domains that affect even more people, like work. An economist found a natural experiment in the higher education systems of England and Scotland during the period he studied. The systems were very similar, except that in England students had to specialise in their mid-teens and pick a specific course of study to apply towards. In Scotland, they could keep trying things at university if they wanted to. His question was: who wins the trade-off, the early or the late specialisers?
And what he saw was that the early specialisers jump out to an income lead because they have more domain-specific skills. The late specialisers get to try more different things. And when they do pick, they have better fit, or what economists call match quality. And so their growth rates are faster. By six years out, they erase that income gap.
Meanwhile, the early specialisers start quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers, essentially because they were made to choose so early that they more often made poor choices. So the late specialisers lose in the short term and win in the long run. I think if we thought about career choice like dating, we might not pressure people to settle down quite so early.
It’s interesting to hear that early specialisers are less likely to enjoy or continue what they do, whereas people who specialise later end up earning more and persevering further down that road.
Applications - Long Term Success Requires a Broad Base#
The next part we want to discuss is how long-term success requires a broad base. Then we’re going to go deeper into this specialist-versus-generalist idea.
We’re going to understand that there are two kinds of environments. One is called a kind environment. These are things like chess and music, where specialising early is beneficial. The tasks are repetitive and can be easily automated. Practice is important—you need to practise that thing a great deal—and the rules are well-defined. In contrast, what David Epstein calls “wicked” environments are those where the rules aren’t clear. There is no set field of play; the rules and the game are constantly changing. Different strategies work better in each type of environment.
Golf and music are kind environments. In these fields, early specialisation is useful and necessary to achieve a high level of success. In wicked environments, where the game is less well-defined, breadth is important because you’re going to apply skills in unique and novel ways.
It’s important to have a larger variety of experiences to draw on, rather than the same narrow set. Here is David Epstein explaining the concept in more detail.
David Epstein: There was some recent research from LinkedIn that showed people who become successful executives—one of the best predictors is the number of job functions they’ve worked across within an industry. Or again, to go to this obsession with precocity: when Mark Zuckerberg was 22, he said, “Young people are just smarter.” And MIT, Northwestern, and the Census Bureau just has research out showing that the average age of a founder of a blockbuster startup on the day of founding, not even when it becomes a blockbuster, is about 46.
But, as with the Tiger story, we focus on the Zuckerberg story. People usually have to zigzag quite a bit before they find that fit, because the goal isn’t initially clear, unlike in kind learning environments.
Applications - Short Term Thinking#
David also has some thoughts on planning your career with this mindset. If we’re going to try a bunch of different things, how does that work in terms of planning? How do we think about a five- or 10-year plan, a long-term vision for our career, what we want to do and the problems we want to solve?
David says that he’s purely a short-term thinker. He doesn’t consider much in the long term. Short-term thinking and jumping to the next opportunity that most interests him allows him to create range along the way and have unique, really cool experiences.
Here he is talking about it now.
David Epstein: One programme that I learned about while researching is called Career Academies that targets kids who, by traditional measures, are not really headed to college, and gives them some sort of vocational training, basic or early exposure to types of work.
Surprisingly, even when they don’t decide to do anything with that career, they still do better overall in terms of income, despite going on to do something totally different. I think some of that is because they’re getting more significant signals about themselves and match quality than they often do in traditional classes.
Malcolm Gladwell: Speaking of match quality, presumably you couldn’t keep sampling forever.
David Epstein: I have no idea what I’m going to do when I grow up—or even what I’m going to do now. When I was a teenager, I thought I was going to go to the Air Force Academy, be a test pilot and be an astronaut. I’ve gotten linearly less long-term goal-directed.
Malcolm Gladwell: I don’t know whether your particular position right now as a best-selling author is generalisable to the general public.
David Epstein: No—but this was in the Dark Horse Project in the book. The common trait of people who find fulfilment in their careers is that they focus on short-term planning.
That resonated with me so much that I ended up as a subject in the study, which I disclosed in the book. They all came in and would say, “Don’t tell people to do what I did. I came through this weird path where I thought I was going to do one thing. Then I tried it and didn’t like it.”
They zig and zag. They all view themselves as having come out of nowhere, which is why the researchers called it the Dark Horse Project. Their common trait is short-term planning: they don’t look around and say, “Here’s who’s younger than me and has more than me.” They say, “Here’s who I am right now. Here are my skills and interests. Here are the opportunities in front of me. I’ll try this one. Here’s my hypothesis about what I’ll learn. A year from now, I’ll change because I will have learned something new.” They continue until they get to a spot where they can uniquely succeed and feel fulfilled.
And so I’ve totally abandoned longer-term planning in favour of these short-term proactive experiments. And why would you have to stop? You can keep doing that your whole life.
There is some really interesting material there from David. This idea of short-term planning runs contrary to modern career advice such as, “Plan out the next five years, and then work out where you want to go from there. Plan your next year.”
Everyone wants a sense of security about where their general life direction is headed. But David raises an interesting point: many people who find success and fulfilment are only thinking about the next best thing for them to do. It doesn’t have to be in the same field or industry. Jumping around and pursuing exciting opportunities is encouraged. We’re not necessarily saying to disregard everything else and continue down the path of specialisation you’re already on, because his research suggests that’s not the most effective approach.
Application - Skill Intersections#
Another really interesting piece to come out of this whole concept is this idea of skill stacking.
This is something I spoke about with Dan Brockwell in episode 15 of the podcast. We discussed the benefits of range and building certain skills to a particular level, similar to what Tim Ferriss talked about earlier in this episode. We might not be the best in the world at each skill individually, but combining them can create something really special.
And here’s Dan explaining this for us.
Dan: Scott Adams was a funny guy. He could tell jokes, but he wasn’t the world’s best. He was a decent artist, he could draw, but he wasn’t the world’s best artist. And he worked in a corporate culture and offices and all that, but it wasn’t like he was the best corporate worker. But the intersection of those three things allowed him to create a really unique intersection.
It allowed him to create a humorous comic about office culture. By being better than average at several things, he found their intersection and was able to get a really big win on the board. When it comes to being a generalist and the range thesis, I haven’t read Range.
So forgive me if I’ve misinterpreted the thesis. Starting early and exploring many things is great, but you’ll find some that you naturally gravitate towards, really enjoy or find energising. I think the magic comes from identifying the two or three things you’re best at—perhaps three or four—and asking what their intersection is.
When I say “best at”, it could be a skill or knowledge about a certain area. Perhaps you’ve spent a lot of time working in sustainability and also love making TikToks as an avid user of social media.
You’re good at short-form content creation and doing funny stuff. You might then create a sustainability TikTok channel. I always think about intersections. Every person has such a beautiful, rich and complex story in life. We will all encounter different things and be great at certain things.
How do you tap into your strengths and combine them into a unique offering that no one else can provide because no one else is you? James, you’re the best at being you—specifically, James. There are other good Jameses. I don’t want to insult them.
I have several friends named James. But I think it’s such a fascinating idea.
There are some really interesting insights there from Dan. It’s a great way to think about your career: what am I both interested in and good at, where is the intersection between those things, and what unique contribution can I provide to the world? If you can think about those things and perhaps develop certain skills, you can build something quite unique.
It’s something only you can do. I thought that was really good. It’s another element of range and building a broad set of experiences, so that we can bring unique insights and differentiators into new areas.
Early Specialisation can be counter-productive#
We’re coming close to the end of this episode now, and I want to finish off with a piece from David Epstein’s TED talk on this topic. And I’d highly recommend watching the TED talk and lots of the other content that I’ve shared.
If you’d like to go deeper on this concept, in this last piece he talks about how often society pressures us to become specialists early. We’re often told, “Go and do this thing and become really great as fast as possible in this one specific area,” when what the world needs—and what is often a better approach—is to sample and pursue many different things. That way, you’ll be able to see new problems in unique ways and make the world a better place. Here is David Epstein in his TED talk.
David Epstein: I think in the well-meaning drive for a head start, we often even counter-productively short-circuit even the way we learn new material at a fundamental level. In a study last year, seventh-grade maths classes in the U.S. were randomly assigned to different types of learning. Some got what’s called blocked practice.
That’s like getting problem types A, A, A, B, B, B, and so on. Progress is fast. Kids are happy. Everything’s great. Other classrooms got assigned to what’s called interleaved practice. That’s like taking all the problem types, throwing them in a hat and drawing them out at random. Progress is slower. Kids are more frustrated.
But instead of learning how to execute procedures, they’re learning how to match a strategy to a type of problem. When the test comes around, the interleaved group blew the blocked practice group away. It wasn’t even close. I’ve found a lot of this research deeply counter-intuitive: the idea that a head start, whether in picking a career, a course of study or simply learning new material, can sometimes undermine long-term success.
And naturally, I think there are as many ways to succeed as there are people. But I think we tend to only incentivise and encourage the Tiger path when increasingly, in a wicked world, we need people who travelled the Roger path as well. Or as the eminent physicist and mathematician and wonderful writer Freeman Dyson put it—and Freeman Dyson passed away yesterday, so I hope I’m doing his words honour here—as he said, “For a healthy ecosystem, we need both birds and frogs.”
Frogs are down in the mud, seeing all the granular details. The birds are soaring up above, not seeing those details, but integrating the knowledge of the frogs. And we need both. The problem, Dyson said, is that we’re telling everyone to become frogs.
And I think in a wicked world, that’s increasingly short-sighted. Thank you very much.
There we go. I think that’s a nice note to end this episode on. Specialising early can be useful; we need people who do that. But if you aren’t specialising early and you’re taking more of the range route, drawing on diverse experiences throughout your career, that’s also a very valid path.
Outro#
I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode today. It’s been great being able to share this with you. If you did enjoy this episode, give it a like, give it a share. And what you can do is you can subscribe to the Graduate Theory newsletter at graduatetheory.com, where you can get emails every single week with each episode and my takeaways.
Thanks again for listening to this episode today, and we’ll see you next week.