Ep. 39: DAVID EPSTEIN on Skills, Practice, and the Subtle Art of Cultivating a Meaningful Career

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Education, Self-improvement, Technology

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2020

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of DEEP QUESTIONS we're joined by a guest host: David Epstein.David is the New York Times bestselling author of THE SPORTS GENE and RANGE. I probably get asked questions about RANGE more than any other book by listeners of this podcast, so I knew we had to get David on the show to share his wisdom.We talk about his career, his (short-lived) public feud with Malcolm Gladwell, and his research habits, but most importantly, we go deep on his breakthrough ideas about skills, practice, and meaning in careers -- answering many of your questions as well as a few of my own.You can find out more about David at https://davidepstein.com.To submit your own questions for this podcast, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com.Thanks to our sponsor Magic Spoon (use magicspoon.com/CAL to receive free shipping).Thank you to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries from my readers
0:18.1	about work, technology, and the deep life.
0:29.0	I am particularly excited about today's episode because I will be joined
0:32.0	by a special guest host.
0:33.0	This individual is probably the author whose books I get asked about the most
0:39.0	by the listeners of the Deep Question Podcast, and I am talking about David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene and more recently,
0:49.6	Range. In this interview, we get into David's story, we find out about how a track-running environmental
1:00.0	scientist from Columbia ended up a senior sports writer at Sports Illustrated.
1:05.6	We also get into some of the details of his system.
1:09.6	He is famous among other writers who know him for the prodigious amount of research he will do for his science books.
1:16.7	He tells us in this interview that he aims for processing 10 academic papers a day,
1:21.5	so we get into the nitty gritty details of how he gets that done.
1:26.1	We also get into a lot of your questions, questions in which David's expertise on things like
1:31.0	specialization and deliberate practice theory and how people get good at things and how people build satisfying careers
1:36.8	Questions where that expertise is quite relevant will really go deep into David's philosophies, the science he's uncovered.
1:44.8	We'll compare and contrast it to the ideas and books I've written like so good they can't ignore you.
1:49.6	And deep work.
1:51.0	It is a deep and rich conversation. It is also a conversation that is right up the alley of deep questions,
1:58.4	listeners because it is deep into the types of topics we love to talk about here on the show.
2:05.0	A quick reminder if you want to submit your own questions for the Deep Questions
2:10.0	podcast sign up for my mailing list at Cal Newport.com.
2:14.8	That's where you'll also get my famous weekly article,
	...

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