When Career Zigzagging is Smarter - with David Epstein

Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2019

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#206: We live in a society that values career specialization. You’re not a “doctor” -- you’re a pediatrician, an anesthesiologist, an oncologist. You’re not a “lawyer” -- you practice family law, or bankruptcy, or criminal law. You’re not an “engineer” -- you’re an electrical engineer who specializes in solar technologies, or a civil engineer who specializes in the application of artificial intelligence in highway traffic design. Specialization is beneficial and necessary, but specializing too early in life or too narrowly can also have drawbacks. According to today’s podcast guest, New York Times bestselling author David Epstein, overspecialization can stifle innovation if we’re all digging in parallel trenches. Sampling a broad range of subjects prior to specializing (e.g. at the undergraduate level, or as a hobby) allows people to make connections between far-flung domains and ideas. If you’re an athlete, spend your childhood playing a variety of sports before you commit to the one you’d like to develop. If you’re a musician, try learning different instruments before you pick your primary focus. If you’re bound for a graduate degree in a STEM field, consider a multidisciplinary undergraduate that pulls from chemistry, physics, biology and perhaps even art. Specialization can come later. We hear stories of people who specialized early in life. Tiger Woods won his first golf competition at age two, beating everyone in the age-10-and-under category. Many world chess champions started training in early childhood. The notion is that early specialization provides a headstart; if you haven’t started training at chess or golf by age 12, it might be too late. But chess and golf are limited in their scope. They’re contained games with fixed, predictable rules. In the wider world, in which challenges and assumptions fluctuate and problems are ill-defined, being a generalist is a lifehack. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode206 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You can afford anything but not everything.
0:10.3	Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else.
0:12.7	And that doesn't just apply to your money, it applies to your time, focus, energy, attention,
0:17.0	it applies to anything in your life that is a scarce or limited resource.
0:20.5	And that leads to two questions.
0:22.0	Number one, what's most important to you?
0:24.0	Not what the society say ought to be most important to you, but what is truly a priority
0:28.8	in your own life.
0:30.2	And number two, how do you align your daily decisions in a way that reflects that even when
0:35.0	that means that those daily decisions need to be unconventional or weird?
0:39.6	Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is
0:42.6	here to explore.
0:43.9	My name is Paula Pant, I'm the host of the Affordable Care Foundation.
0:47.4	And today's guest, David Epstein, is a New York Times bestselling author who has an interesting
0:52.7	thesis.
0:54.2	He states that in a world in which specialization is encouraged, it's actually the generalists
1:03.0	who triumph.
1:04.6	In almost every knowledge-based field, specialization is encouraged.
1:09.4	And while there are many advantages to this type of specialization, it also may have the
1:14.5	effect of stifling innovation.
1:17.5	Overspecialization has the potential to stifle innovation if all of us are digging in parallel
1:22.2	trenches.
	...

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