Learn a reliable, yet counterintuitive strategy to be the best in your field.
Animated Summary by Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
What does 2x NBA MVP Steve Nash, 6x NFL Super Bowl Champion Tom Brady, and 20x Grand Slam champion Roger Federer have in common?
None of them had a head start.
- Steve Nash grew up playing soccer and didn’t start basketball until he was 13.
- Tom Brady spent much of his childhood playing baseball, and he was drafted into professional baseball before pro football.
- Roger Federer sampled a wide array of sports before deciding to focus on tennis in his early teens.
These three great athletes were Late Specializers.
Conventional wisdom tells us that if you want to be the best, you need to specialize early to get a head stat on the competition. But conventional wisdom is dead wrong.
Despite the stories you hear about Mozart learning the piano before the age of 4. Or Tiger Woods hitting a golf ball at the age of 2, most kids that start specializing too early, fizzle out, and rarely achieve greatness.
Greatness in sports and music is most often proceeded by a period of Sampling—trying out many different sports and many different instruments before specializing in one sport or one instrument.
It turns out that late specialization also happens to be the norm among people who have lucrative and impactful careers.
- Todd Rose director of Harvards mind, brain and education program.
- Ogi Ogas set out to study people who were successful and fulfilled at work.
Dark Horse Study
Nearly every successful and fulfilled professional thought they were the odd ones, outsiders, long shots, because they didn’t know what they wanted to do early in their career, and they didn’t take a straight path to their ultimate profession. They told researchers, most people don’t do it this way.
- The majority of people with successful and fulfilling careers, seemed lost at the beginning of their careers.
- Instead of specializing they sampled many different roles, many different fields, and worked with a variety of people.
- They didn’t have 5 or 10 year career goals, they had 90 day goals at best.
The Dark Horse study researchers summed up the moment by moment mindset of the most successful people in the study as this:
- Here is who I am at this moment.
- Here are my motivations.
- Here is what I’ve found I like to do.
- Here is what i’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities.
- Which opportunity is the best match right now?
Most of us think we know ourselves well. We know what we are good at, what we are interested in, we think we know what we’ll be good at in 5, 10, and 20 years from now.
But the science says otherwise. In the book, Epstein says, “Our work preferences and our life preferences, do not stay the same…because we do not stay the same.”
Think back to the career you were sure you wanted 10 years ago.
- Does it align with where you are now?
- Does it seem a little ridiculous today?
- Think about all of the people that realized half way through Medical School that it wasn’t a good fit.
The most momentous personality changes occur between the ages 18 and ones late 20s. Specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist. It could work, but it makes for worse odds.
“I feel sorry for the people who know exactly what they are going to do from the time they’re sophomores in high school.”
The only way to truly find a good career fit, is to have a wide range of experiences, sampling different jobs, and experimenting with different ideas. Finding the right fit requires doing, not reflecting.
Eventually with enough sampling and experimentation, the people in the Dark Horse study found the right fit, and by the time the found a good career fit, they had a major, tactical advantage because they had a wide range of experiences that allowed them to be great analogical thinkers.
“Analogical thinking allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts.”
Analogical thinking also allows us to understand that which we can not see at all.
Regardless of which profession you end up in, generating ideas and problem-solving is becoming more and more important. When it comes to generating ideas and solving problems, having more analogies at your disposal is a super power.
-
In 1989, the Exxon Valdez famously hit a reef and leaked a massive amount of oil into the Prince William Sound. When the oil mixed with water, it turned into a substance that the spill workers referred to as chocolate mousse. Thick, like peanut butter, which made it really hard to remove. 20 years later, there is still 32,000 gallons of oil stuck along the coast.
-
In 2007, Soctt Pegau created an online contest for people to propose to solutions to extract the oil and the winner would get $20,000. After months of suggestions, a solution came from someone outside the Energy industry. A chemist from Illinois named John Davis, but it wasn’t his background in chemistry that led to the solution, it was his brief experience in construction pouring concrete that led to a breakthrough solution.
The more time we take early on in our career to have a wide range of experiences, and interact with a wide range of people, the more analogies we’ll accumulate, like Pegau’s breakthrough solution, which will allow us to solve more and more nuanced problems and be more effective to any career we commit to.
The Takeaway?
Don’t be quick to marry your first career option. Instead date many different roles and different career opportunities. Start off on a 6 lane highway, not a one way street. Hop betwen the lanes by taking different roles that seem interesting.
As you pursue a range of experiences, and develop new skills, or take your skills and apply them to new problems, remember this: it’s going to feel inefficient and messy, but that is a great sign that you’re learning, because the most effective form of learning is never smooth or easy.
When you have doubts and you feel like you’re falling behind your peers, don’t worry.
“Early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but later specializers made up for that head start by finding work that fit their skills and personalities.”
People with a head start are more likely to burn out. It’s like the person at the start of a marathon who sprints, and you find them sitting on the sidelines at mile 10 as you gradually run past them.
If you’re ever worried about starting a business too late, fear not.
Researchers at northwestern, MIT, and US Census Bureau studied tech companies, and showed that among the fastest growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was 45 when the company was launched. Take your time and accumulate a range of experiences, and skills.
When you feel like you have sampled enough, and you know yourself well enough, go deep on an interest and get really good. Breadth before depth helps these high performers rise to the top, and allows others find successful and fulfilling careers.