David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day!
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I was told that if you do ten thousand hours in anything you become a master in it. Well that's wrong. This idea undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development. If you're doing that, then you're missing opportunities. David Epstein is a New York Times bestselling author whose infamous work challenges the conventional wisdom about specialization, productivity, and what it takes to become successful. What advice would you give to a person that's thinking about how to navigate their way to being really good at something? First of all, being a scientist of your own development and creating what's called a self regulatory practice. What is that? So the cycle is flect, what you need to work on, plan, come up with an experiment for how you can work on that. Is that getting a job, is it taking a class, monitor, and then evaluate. And people who do that repeatedly, they just keep improving. Two, so for anything you're doing, if you're not 15, 20% of the time failing, then you're not in your zone of optimal push, where you're getting as much better as you possibly can. What about focus?
I get distracted easily and I want to be more productive in the time that I spend working. Don't start your day with email. It's been shocking to look at the research, how big of an impairment that is. What about notifications? So if you're getting distracted all the time, if you say, Well now I really have to hunker down, I'm gonna get rid of notifications, you will start self-interrupting to maintain the interruptions to which you have become accustomed. Really? Yeah. That will go away, but not immediately. But there's a lot of things that you can do for a productive day, for example, if you that has a enormous influence in your product day. Interesting. The other thing I found which was pretty shocking was when you start talking about some of the dangers of specialism. Yes. Harvard Light Studies found if you're at the hospital with certain cardiac conditions when the most esteemed specialists are away, you're less likely to die. The conclusion was that's because
David. How do you summarise the work that you do and why you do it? And who are you really doing it for? I am Obsessed with
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