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.” It doesn’t mean breakthrough creation is luck, although that helps, but rather that it is hard and inconsistent. Going where no one has is a wicked problem. There is no well-defined formula or perfect system of feedback to follow. It’s like the stock market that way; if you want the sky highs, you have to tolerate a lot of lows. As InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham told me, “breakthrough and fallacy look a lot alike initially.”
The question I set out to explore was how to capture and cultivate the power of breadth, diverse experience, and interdisciplinary exploration, within systems that increasingly demand hyperspecialization, and would have you decide what you should be before first figuring out who you are.
Early in the book, I discussed athletes and musicians, because they are practically synonymous with early specialization. But among athletes who go on to become elite, broad early experience and delayed specialization is the norm. Musicians arrive at greatness via an incredible diversity of paths, but early hyperspecialization is often not necessary for skill development and in the more improvisational forms it is rare—although, as in sports, many adults have an enormous financial interest in making it seem essential. Sviatoslav Richter was one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century; he started formal lessons at twenty-two. Steve Nash is a relatively normal-sized Canadian who did not get a basketball until he was thirteen years old; he won the NBA MVP award, twice. As I write this, I am listening to a professional violinist who started when she was eighteen. Of course, she was told to stop before she started because she was too old. She now makes a point of teaching beginner adults. The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even these relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it.
So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind. Two Roman historians recorded that when Julius Caesar was a young man he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain and broke down in tears. “Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable,” he supposedly said. Pretty soon, that concern was a distant memory and Caesar was in charge of the Roman Republic—which he turned into a dictatorship before he was murdered by his own pals. It’s fair to say that like most youth athletes with highlight reels, he peaked early. Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.
Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.
Finally, remember that there is nothing inherently wrong with specialization. We all specialize to one degree or another, at some point or other. My initial spark of interest in this topic came from reading viral articles and watching conference keynotes that offered early hyperspecialization as some sort of life hack, a prescription that will save you the wasted time of diverse experience and experimentation. I hope I have added ideas to that discussion, because research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated. As Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a century ago, of the free exchange of ideas, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
Acknowledgments
I VIEW BOOK WRITING as kind of like running the 800—torture in the middle, but if you PR or give a supreme effort, pretty soon you look back and say, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” It was, but still you should do it again.
All sorts of cool things transpired while I worked on this book. For example: I learned a ton. Also, one day while my brain was overheating, a cardinal, a blue jay, and an oriole appeared near my windowsill—that’s all the eponymous birds of Major League Baseball teams. That never happens.
Thank you, first, to the entire team at Riverhead, especially my editor, Courtney Young. Courtney spooked me a little when we first agreed to go about this book project together by saying something like, “I’d be worried if I weren’t familiar with you.” [Gulp]. She then proceeded to respond like a great coach developing an athlete; she let me engage in broad, self-directed activity, and when I resurfaced two years later with a manuscript that was too long, she switched gears and responded to my desire for fast and frequent feedback as I cut it down to size and shape. When the time came, she gave feedback that made a wicked learning environment a bit more kind (“Yes, I like it; now he sounds like less of a magical gnome.” —Courtney’s feedback on what may have been an overwritten description.). Appropriately, she has range; she almost became an engineer.
Thank you to my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who finished 235th in the New York City Marathon, which is important, but not so important as his animating mission, which, as far as I can tell, is to help writers earn their freedom. To use a sports analogy, my strategy for working with an agent was to draft the best athlete available and get out of the way.
Thank you to everyone who took part in my tortuous fact-checking process, but especially Emily Krieger and Drew Bailey, and the interviewees who gave their time (again . . . and sometimes again) so that I could pester them about things they had already told me. Thanks to Masaharu Kawamata and Tyler Walker for help with Japanese translation.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. The first time we met was for a debate at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, framed as “10,000-hours vs. The Sports Gene.” (It’s on YouTube.) It turned into a great discussion, and I think we both took new thoughts home. He invited me for an interval workout the next day, and then again, and we got to talking (only during warmup) about that whole “Roger vs. Tiger” idea. The discussion was filed away somewhere in my head and surfaced when I interacted with Tillman Scholars. I’m not sure I would have explored the topic without it. As psychologist Howard Gruber wrote, “Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful.”
This book was the greatest organizational challenge I’ve faced; figuring out how to gather information, what to include, and then where to put it overwhelmed me many times. A quote kept coming to mind: “It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla’s tired.” Whatever the reception, I’m proud I kept coming back for more. And I thank the friends and family who supported me and accepted my answer of “hopefully next year” to so many questions. Believe me, it’s not that I didn’t want tickets to that thing I like. It’s just that, as any Westerosi knows, my house words are: “When my book is done.” Those supporters: My brother, Daniel (whose enthusiastic response to my rambling about ideas in chapter 4 convinced me to write about them); sister, Charna (she may have purchased all the copies of my last book); my parents, Mark and Eve, who always waited until after I did something ridiculous to weigh in, rather than prohibiting it beforehand. It makes for a vibrant sampling period. Thanks to “Prince Andrei,” you’ll know who you are when you read this; and to my niece Sigalit Koufax (yes, that Koufax) Epstein-Pawar, and her dad Ameya; and to Andrea and John for moral and caloric support, and the whole Weiss and Green families. Special thanks to Liz O’Herrin and Mike Christman for getting me involved with the Tillman Foundation; to Steve Mesler for getting me involved with Classroom Champions; to my late friend Kevin Richards, without whom I probably would not have become a science writer; and to my friend Harry Mbang, who is never not up for a midnight run to a certain bookstore. Thanks to the entire Chalkbeat family—keep swimming.