The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and David Epstein Talk Range & Resilience

Episode Date: August 1, 2020

On today’s Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with author and journalist David Epstein about the power of range, how to get the right kind of experience to be successful, and more.David Epstein is the author of #1 New York Times best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. He has previously worked as a reporter at ProPublica and Sports Illustrated and also wrote the best-selling The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.Get your copy of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: https://geni.us/BX7P90This episode is brought to you by Felix Gray, maker of amazing blue light-filtering glasses. Felix Gray glasses help prevent the symptoms of too much blue light exposure, which can include blurry vision, dry eyes, sleeplessness, and more. Get your glasses today at http://felixgrayglasses.com/stoic and try them for 30 days, risk-free.This episode is also brought to you by Mack Weldon, an amazing online retailer for men’s basics. Mack Weldon believes in smart design, premium fabrics and simple shopping—and they’ve created a great new loyalty program, Weldon Blue. Try out Mack Weldon today. And for 20% off your first order, visit http://mackweldon.com and use promo code STOIC.This episode is also brought to you by Future. Future pairs you up with a remote personal trainer that you can get in touch with from your home. Your trainer will give you a full exercise regimen that works for your specific fitness goals, using the equipment you have at home. It works with your Apple Watch, and if you don’t already have one, Future will give you one for free. Sign up at tryfuture.com/stoic and get your first two weeks with your personal trainer for just $1.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow David Epstein: Homepage: https://davidepstein.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidEpsteinFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ByDavidEpstein/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here, on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare.

We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

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and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. When I was on Book 2, I guess it was book before last, I don't even remember anymore.

I don't know about you, but I feel like all time in space is collapsed. So this could have been a year ago, it could have been two years ago. Anyways, my friend Tim Urban through a little sort of dinner, book party for me in New York City. Mark Manson was there, David Wells-Wallis was there, the New York magazine reporter, a bunch of interesting people, and my guest today was supposed

to be there but he couldn't make it. And he sent me an email and I read one of his books and so I said, hey, you know, no worries, I was hoping to meet you, I love your stuff. And it turned out he had just moved from New York to Washington, DC, where I was going on the next stop in the tour. And we got together. We actually had coffee at Compass Coffee, which is a great coffee chain there in DC, which I actually, at the beginning of Brass Check, they were one of our first clients. We did a bunch of work for.

It's been awesome to watch that company blow up. Anyways, the person who's supposed to come to the party that I had coffee with was, I guess, today, David Epstein. And at that point, David had only written the sports gene, which is a great book, which I'd read. I'd read a bunch of his stuff in sports illustrated. And I'd seen some of his exchanges with Malcolm Gladwell. So I knew of his work, although I didn't know him. And we sat there and had coffee in the morning before I went to my talk or caught a train or whatever it was. And I remember he was telling me about the book

that he was working on. And it seemed like, I don't know, it seemed interesting, but it didn't seem like it would be a huge hit. He said he was looking at the difference between specialists and generalists. And he told me that the central sort of comparison of the book was between Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Roger Federer, having come to tennis relatively late

but a multi-sport athlete, Tiger Woods, having went a specialist and golf from the time he was two years old. So I said it sounded interesting, you know, which in the best we won our separate ways. And then a few months later, he sent me the galley of the book. And that book is range, which I raved about.

It was probably the best book I read last year. We've interviewed him twice for daily, still, kind of different email interviews. Written a bunch about him. Raved about this book. If you haven't read range yet, you absolutely should. It's awesome. Dave is a great guy.

He's in my writers group that I told you about, that meets in Sedone every year. And he and I got to go for a couple runs together. I got to talk more just a great dude. This is a sort of a far ranging interview. As you can imagine, we talked about not just the themes in the book, how they pertain to stoicism, a reaction I had to the book, which we talk about. And immediately made me think of a comparison, one of the most famous sort of comparison contrasts in ancient history between the Athenians and the Spartans.

So we kicked that around, and you know, it was actually something that I read in David's book that bounced into a conversation. I was having with a friend of mine that inspired an article I wrote. I think we've run it here in the podcast before, the idea of being a multi-hyphenate, which is sort of my take on what it means to have range. And I think that's what's interesting about the Stokes, is the Stokes were not these sort of singular individuals,

but the Stokes weren't these specialists, they were multifaceted individual, Seneca being so impressive as we talked about with James. Ram recently, not just a writer, not just a political advisor, not just a business person, but sort of all of those things and more. Even as a writer, he had the range of being a brilliant nonfiction writer, sort of writing self-help, how-to philosophy, then also writing some of the most popular fiction of his day as well. So I don't think this idea of range is just sort of a modern, you know, sort of capitalistic concept.

I think it goes to the core of philosophy. I think it's important. And I think it drives very well with stoicism. It's been awesome. As I said to get to know David, he subscribes to the Daily Stoic email and sends me replies every once in a while and daily dad, I know he's a new father as well.

So I hope you can leave this interview sort of inspired to expand your range. It's certainly something that I left David's book with and something I have always been trying to apply to my life, but it's good to have a reminder from time to time. Anyway, David's one of my favorite people. I know you all have this interview. Check it out, the talk soon. So David, I was I was thinking about you the other day

because when I first read Range, I remember in the Galley form, I sent you a note about this, but I've been rereading some Plutarch for this project that I'm researching in, and so I've been reading a lot about the Spartans, and you come up with such an interesting dichotomy in the book of sort of range versus specialization. And it seems to me that the Spartans are sort of the ultimate example of the importance of specialization.

They become the greatest warriors on the face of the planet, never had a more dedicated, more singularly focused sort of warrior culture in any society, anywhere in the globe. And so ultimately, they end up defeating Athens in the Peloponnesian War and many other times, but famously in the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians are the generalists, these are the philosophers and the artists

and the businessmen and the merchants and the poets and all these things. And so one might see this as the ultimate evidence that specialists triumph over generalists, but the interesting thing about the story is that this essentially wrecks spartus culture. They're actually not able to effectively rule Greece because all they know about is the one thing that they're good at. I remember when you first mentioned that to me, I was sort of like mad, I hadn't thought to take it on myself. I think that's a really interesting analogy

to some of the things I wrote about. And I guess I would also suggest that, and maybe this shows my sort of range oriented bias, but that we have benefited a lot more from the Athenians than from the Spartans. And so, I think you're right. And I think there's no doubt that there are advantages to specialization, no doubt at all.

And I try to say that repeatedly in range that we need specialists, for sure, we need them. The problem is we kind of set up all of our cultural forces, whether that's just our encouragement or what we tell people to do to get ready for their careers or what we make them think about like compensation for being a specialist to funnel everyone into sort of being the same. And I think that makes you good at something, but it can also make you really inflexible and rigid. And I think, and a lot less adaptable. I think we've actually seen that in some cases like in the healthcare system during this pandemic, we've seen sort of a lack of

flexibility. I was just this is might seem far afield, but the editors picked for an article in the largest journal for a society of hospital physicians recently, thaters pick article was called learning to unspecialize in COVID-19 because one of the findings has been that in this system that's all specialists, there's been a real lack of adaptability when things change. And I think that to me feels relevant to Sparta. Yeah, and it's interesting when you think about

that maybe you wouldn't think that range and resiliency would be sort of part of the same package, but I, but I think that they are because you're able to fall back on a breadth of experience, you can draw analogies, you can, you have more experiences, but then I think it also just gives you multiple tools in your toolkit in a way that the specialist works provided that the nail and the hammer are aligned, but that's not really how life works. Yeah, I think what you just mentioned, having the broader toolbox and essentially being able to, I think one of the things you're describing and as resiliency is like the ability

to abandon what worked yesterday for something new and to have skills that you can use to look for something new. And if you look at, and that kind of showed up in an advantage in a lot of domains I looked at. So for example, in tech innovation, if you look at patent research for a long time actually in the 20th century, the most impactful patents were authored by teams of specialists, you know, who dove deeper and deeper, deeper into one area of technology, as classified by the patent office. But then, in the information age, as suddenly, information is being disseminated a lot more rapidly and widely, it becomes easier to be broader than a specialist. The technology starts changing more rapidly, and now the most impactful patents begin to

be authored by teams of people who've worked in a large number of different technological classes. And they're often combining things from different areas, or they're pivoting away from yesterday's things to something new. And in fact, the more sort of ambiguous and unclear the area of tech was, the greater the advantage was for those kinds of people. And there's analogous findings in like, you know, to go to sort of a totally more subjective feeling end of the spectrum, very similar finding in comic books where basically in the early 1970s, almost overnight, a censorship of comic books went out the window and that was a huge disruption. And there was this race for creative market share. And a pair of researchers once studied

the next 20 years of creativity, seeing what characteristics allowed some people to capitalize on that, and essentially seize more creative market share. And it was not experience in the field. It wasn't the number of previous comics made. It wasn't the resources of their publisher. It was the number of different genres that they had worked in.

Crime, comedy, fantasy, adult, nonfiction, whatever. And again, they were able to move away from things that worked yesterday, but all the sudden something changed, and those old solutions didn't work today. And they were able to draw on their broad toolbox to adapt. Well, I was actually going to ask you something something related to that because I think when you look at our field, when you look at writers, and then when you look at the writers who seem to be having the most impact in or the greatest reach,

they don't seem to be coming out of academia for the most part, or when they do come out of academia, it's rare that what they're writing about either is what they specialized in or they don't have some hyper, what they're writing about is not their hyper specialized expertise, right? So, you know, I look at someone like Tyler Cowan or I look at someone like you or you look at someone like Malcolm Gladwell or when you look at these interesting writers, they're not academic specialists. What they have is the ability to communicate big ideas, and then the ability to replicate

that success, to do it multiple times, seems to be based on their ability to apply that skill to vastly different topics, right? Like you can't, you're not writing the same thing over and over again. Yeah, and I mean, I came out of previously training to be a scientist, but in geology, which I know right about it all ever, but sort of brought some thought tools over from it. And you actually, I'll try to go through, you just brought three things to mind, three writers,

and I'll try to go through them quickly, so don't just drag on, but that are exactly sort of in line with your points. Carl Sagan, who is one of my favorite science writers, he won the Pulitzer for a book on psychology, right? Everyone knows him as an astrophysicist. Sure. And so you all know a Harari, who I think a lot of people have read Sapiens, he, the genesis of that book was that his senior colleagues at, you know,

his university, none of them wanted to teach the intro course to like undergrads because it was so broad in a survey course. And so in developing his curriculum, that's where he got the idea for the book, which has gotta be like one of the best-selling nonfiction books since we've been alive, I think. It's like the only one I've seen

in every international airport I've been to in like years. And finally, this is something I cut from range. Simon Shama, the historian, I was at a conference one time. What is he written? His most famous book, maybe this one called Landscape and Memory, but he wrote a book about the transatlantic slave trade that one of the big awards, the National Book Award or the book critics,

or one of the big awards, the National Book Award or the book critics, one of the big huge awards. And so that book specifically was turned into like award-winning BBC series, you know, it educated like millions of people about the transatlantic slave trade. And I was once at an academic conference where a panelist stood up with that book, another guy started slapping the cover on it

and was like, how could he write this? He's an expert in 17th century Netherlands or something like that. And I'm like, you're talking about a book that was just one of the biggest awards in the world led to a BBC series that taught an incredible number of people about the transatlantic slave trade. And you're saying, how could he have thought

to do this because his specialty is in 17th century Netherlands? That one I was just sort of like, over specialization has become, like it's own reward for itself in some areas of academia. No, I think, I mean, I think that's right. Look, Chomsky, you know,

whatever people think of his politics is like one of the most cited scholars of all time, but not in politics as a linguist, right? And so you can take this expertise and that teaches you how to think and that teaches you a whole bunch of things, and then you expand out from there, which I think sort of ties into philosophy. It's interesting when I look at the Stoics.

There's one or two who are sort of just, you know, you'd say just philosophers, but the vast majority of them, their philosophy is very much a reaction or sort of an extension of their life experiences. So, you know, Kato doesn't write anything, but is a philosopher for what he does. You know, Seneca is sort of doing all these different things. I have this footnote in my new book, which obviously isn't out yet, but in lives of the Stokes, that I'm sort of jumping off something from James Rom, who I really like. He was saying that there's Seneca wrote all these beautiful letters and essays on stoicism. And then there was also, at the same time, Seneca, the playwright. And the plays are so different and so good that for most of history, people

were convinced there was two Senacas. So there was Senacas of the philosopher, Senacas, the playwright. And he's saying, this is the equivalent of if Emerson had also wrote Faustus, right? Like that, that you had the guy who's the the preeminent philosopher of his time and the preeminent entertainer of his time. And, and it's actually even more interesting than that as I write in the footnote, because, you know, Santa is also serving as console to Rome and his Nero's, you know, sort of advisor. So I'm saying actually it'd be like if Emerson was the philosopher wrote Faustus and was like Lincoln's vice president, right? And so you talk about a range, you know, it really is possible to do those things at the highest

level, but I don't know, maybe it's a failure of an imagination to think that one can do that. Well, I think, and you brought up two things, interesting, the first one is just sort of a factoid that you reminded me of, which is, I'm adding an afterward arrange, and I was looking up like the origins of the phrase, Jack of All Trades, Master of None. And it turns out the long version is Jack of All Trades, Master of None, oftentimes better than Master of One. But of course, we've got the off the end. But anyway, the first written use of this as an insult was in the form of Johannes Fak totem,

which is like a jack of all trades in New Latin, and it was leveled at a young poet who had no higher education and was trying to write plays in addition to poetry, to copy scripts, do some acting, help a theater company, and it was criticizing him for doing all these different things. And it was William Shakespeare. So he was the target of the very first written use of the Jack Valtraids insult, turned out okay. The other thing that you reminded me of was, I think since we, because we sort of have this intuition

against being broad now, I think we make the mistake where, if we were thinking about someone like, like, Senaiko, where instead we'd go find someone who was good at one thing, like they created a tech company that was successful or some company that's successful. And then we assume that they've just figured out all the other stuff without them having to be curious about all the other stuff. And so I think we've often ended up with some kind of incurious leaders because instead of, you know, demanding that they be curious about multiple things,

we say, oh, they succeeded in this other thing. So clearly they can succeed in anything. And I think that's a real mistake. Yeah, it's, so two things. I want to come back to that. I would say to go back to the philosopher and the writing thing we were talking about. It is an interesting thing

because I'll hear from lots of people that want to be writers. And so the instinct is like, I'm gonna go specialize in train in the craft of the thing, which is important. But that's also, I think a similar failure of imagination, right? Okay, what is the process?

I'm gonna figure out the process rather than thinking, I'm gonna go live an interesting life, I'm gonna go experience out the process rather than thinking, I'm going to go live an interesting life, I'm going to go experience things. So I think the reason Santa was such a great playwright isn't just that he's a great writer. It's that he writes these sort of dark, almost disturbing plays that when you merge the figures together, you're like, oh, he's just sub-tweeting his experience with Nero and Claudius and the Rome's upper classes. This is an outlet for the real shit that he's seeing. And yes, he's a talented writer, but it's primarily the subject matter that's making the

plays good, not his mastery of Latin. I think that's going to be your next book. It's going to be the sub-tweeting lives of the Stoics. But to your point about the writing craft, when I was at sports illustrated, I would get commonly asked by undergraduates, what should I study if I want to get into long-form journalism or long-form sports writing or whatever. And they would usually say, should I major in English or journalism? And I was like, I have no idea. I studied geology and astronomy. So I would be like, you know, a statistics course or biology course never heard anyone.

Like, do something that will allow you to compete on your own ground, not like looking and saying, well, everybody where I'm going is doing this same thing. So I'll do that same thing. Then you'll end up in a line with a bunch of people who are the same. And like you said, I think living an interesting life is really a great way to get good story ideas. When I was trying to transition out of science into writing, I just sort of called Lawrence Gonzalez, this writer, I love who wrote a book called Deep Survival, and what should I do? Should I start pitching articles? Should I try to get an internship? And he said, go work on a Russian fishing vessel for five years and then call me when you get back.

And I didn't have any idea what he meant. But I did end up going work on a ship, not a Russian shipping vessel, but a seismic vessel. But in retrospect, I realized he was saying, go do some interesting things. And that's how ideas or things are right about. And now I look back and like, you know, live done that shit back at least. I mean, it shows up in my latest book, right? And it was a long time ago. So I think he was really right. He even knows hard for me to see at the time. Yeah, so you could go pay, you know, $150,000 to get an MFA from Iowa, or you could go make, you know, $50,000 a year as a wildfire fireman, or join the Marines or volunteer in the Peace Corps

or something, and walk away in a much better financial situation, but least of all, but also have some experiences or some glimpse into humanity that's gonna make your work stand out. Like I said this before, like Keith Richards' biography is not good because of how well it's written. It could have been written in crann,

filled with misspellings, and it would still be good because he's Keith Richards, because of what he did and what he experienced that made that book so compelling. Yeah, I mean, I think there's no substitute for experiencing a wide range of challenges and emotions and I fear sometimes that the rush, you know, what I call and

range, the cult of the head start, makes people feel like that is a disadvantage if they go and get some wide ranging experience. I think that's, you know, obviously one of the things that was troubling me. So to go back to this idea of examples, I found this when I was writing Ego's The Enemy. There's sort of a weird survivorship bias or publication bias, I forget what you would call it in this case. Okay, the reason people think ego is acceptable is that most of the people they have heard of are naturally gonna be a bit more egotistical than the people who are just as successful

but they haven't heard of, right? And I'm wondering if with range, it's a little bit like that. It's just easier to wrap your head around a tiger woods than it is to wrap your head around a bow jack. Like bow jacks and isn't all the bow jacks and it's very famous. Bow jacks and it doesn't become twice as famous for being good at two sports. In a way, he becomes half as famous because he's and again, this isn't a perfect example, but but you get what'm saying. Because he's splitting it over two things in some respects,

it's not as concentrated, it's not as easy to wrap your head around and therefore maybe doesn't stand out as like the iconic example of acts to people in the way that Jordan or Tiger Woods or someone else might. Yeah, I mean, the, in one of the reasons I used the Tiger Woods story is, you know, you can go on YouTube and see him on national television at two years old. And one is just dramatic, right? It's just cool to watch.

But, but also I think it feels like something that we can extrapolate to whatever else we want to be good at because it's so simple to digest mentally. But then, you know, I think the reason I wanted to compare the Roger Federer story to it is because I think he's every bit as famous as an adult as Tiger Woods is, but because his developmental story involves like a dozen different sports and not being focused on being the greatest early on and, you know, even declining to move up to higher levels. And I think it's telling that even tennis enthusiasts don't know anything about his development story because it isn't that sort of linear easily digestible you know tempting to extrapolate one even though it's the norm according to the science. Or I was just reading did you read that that ESPN piece about

Maya more this morning? No I didn't. it's incredible. Do you know who she is? Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the greatest WMBA players in the history of the game, one of the best high school and college players of all time. But she sat out this season, basically, to fight for social justice. Like, before everything that's been happening in the world, she basically took a year off at the peak of her game to fight for this man who's basically was, I think, sentenced to, she argues wrongly to a 50-year prison sentence,

and she basically took a year off to focus exclusively on freeing this person. And so you can think about like, first off, just to be educated enough, to be dedicated enough, to be educated enough to be dedicated enough to be determined enough to walk away from your game and be able to make a difference in the in you know something is dramatically different from the WMBA as as you know sort of criminal justice reform is incredible but but that comes at a huge cost like that's one more year that she's not playing on national television right and that's one more year that she's not playing on national television, right? And that's one more year she's not doing endorsements. She's not, you know, being talked about, she's probably not on social media. She's busy.

So I think that's the other interesting thing. It's like, perhaps what happens, the more you focus on range and actual mastery of different things or throwing yourself into huge challenges, one cost may just be your time to spend cultivating your brand or self-promoting. And so these things are somewhat obscured from the public's view. And so we naturally gravitate towards somebody who is, you know, a little better at cultivating their image. And then we get the sense that, oh, that's what, real mastery looks like, but in fact, there's these other people that we've not heard of.

Yeah, yeah. And to the more point, by the way, reminded me of Muhammad Ali, who missed some of the prime of his career. Sure. He was a conscientious objector. And it's interesting now, everyone's like, oh, he's a hero, but it wasn't really viewed

as a hero until he became old and sort of non-threatening, which I think is a theme for a lot of famous people who make social justice protests. They look like heroes in retrospect, but they're treated quite poorly at the time often. But to your point, I think you and I have probably faced this quite a bit, right? When my first book was sort of a surprise success, the sports scene, and then the pressure was from a lot of directions to write part two, and to be the sports gene guy and stuff like that. And I'm sure you get that too, right?

But you've continued to do, and obviously you have some good brands, but you've also continued to broaden them, even though there's always pressure to narrow it and narrow it and narrow it. And just be the one thing guy, whatever that thing is, and I understand some of the commercial benefits of that. I mean, for me, it's not the life I wanna live or the works I wanna do, but I get it. I get it at the same time because it is. It's just easier to digest.

It's just easier to make definitions. It's like, to move that out to conceptual level, like the reason we silo research, know, research as we break it down into disciplines is because it's, it's a necessary evil to make the world sort of come more comprehensible, but somebody has to put it back together at the end of the day, right? And so I think we, it's easier for us to think about these sort of disembodied specialties. Hey, it's Ryan. My speaking agent told me a couple years ago, they were like, look, if you, like, they were like, you would think writing more books that sell more copies would help

you raise your fee and reach more people. But it's actually just harder for, like, if you had only written one book and given one TED talk about it, that would be easier for very busy organizers and conference bookers and whatever to wrap their heads around. Instead splitting it out over multiple things makes it harder because as you said, you're not the guy to do X or the woman who speaks about or is known for why. But I think what you're ultimately doing is taking a short-term hit to have far more long-term impact.

But then also, I think it's much more sustainable. So it's like, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to maximize revenue and sales and reach in the short-term or are you trying to develop revenue and sales and, you know, reach in the short term, or you trying to develop a body of lasting enduring work. And I think sometimes people get distracted by the short term incentives. Yeah, I mean, to me, to me, like the, what would have been unmarketable subtitle, but is really the overarching theme of range, was that sometimes the things you can do that cause like the most rapid short-term progress

actually undermine long-term development. And I think you're talking about one of those. And I also think it's, you know, having a sort of a broader toolbox and network of enterprises, some of the psychologists study creativity call it. It's a creative innovators have a lot of stuff going on these tools of the network of enterprise. It's a lot more sustainable have a lot of stuff going on these tools, network of enterprise. It's a lot more sustainable for a lot more people, too, right?

If you go really narrow, then in addition to all the other issues, you'd better be like of the one, you know, because it's just you have to like compete on this very, very, very, very narrow turf and make sure that you're, I guess, the best or most desirable or most visible brand or whatever it is. Yeah, I think you're, I think you're, I think you're totally right. And it's difficult, but I think it's better in the long run. It's been better for me in the long run. That's for sure.

I just sort of use different identities when I'm in different places. It's kind of weird, but. Well, one of the ways I've been talking about range, it was a good term I heard it. The idea of being a multi-hyphenate, and I think, you know, obviously in the sports context, it's like, hey, okay, you were a tight end

and now, or sorry, you were a power forward and then you transition and now you're a tight end for football team or whatever. But I think obviously in the real world where you're not playing positions or whatever, I think it's about having multiple things, multiple streams of income, multiple areas of interest or passion, because not only is this more creatively

fulfilling, but I think it's more resilient in the sense as we're looking at right now, and I think this is a very stoic idea. It's like, think about the people that we know that we're like, hey, yeah, I kind of write books, but I really just do it to do speaking. And then all of a sudden speaking disappears, right? Or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh,

or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, or, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or, uh, or multi-hyphen that is more resilient in that sense because, you know, you're harder to kill, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, when the travel, you know,

when the pandemic started, like all of the work I was doing was traveling and stopped on a dime, which wasn't, you know, some of the other, like, my email list with some other speakers is someone who are absolutely freaking out. And I'm sort of like, I've got other projects. I'll go back to you. It has no problem.

The next day, just doing something else. But I think you're, there's something important sort of embedded in what you're saying. Do you like the difficulty sometimes of marketing yourself in the short term when you're multi-hyphenate? And this reminds me, we just recently did this year's selection for the class of Patelman Foundation Scholars. You know, it gives scholarships to military veterans and spouses

for sort of career changing and education. And they're big fans of yours. And I think I've been involved with it like five years now and obstacles the way has been in at least three application essays that I've seen. Oh, that's so cool. But one, it was kind of interesting because now even

having written range, right, I'll sometimes get the finalist applications. And you're sort of like the first impression, even for me, is like this person looks a little scattered, because like, just to make a hypothetical example, say after high school, they started some job and they didn't like it. And so they joined the military. And then they end up in whatever the core and all valley administering healthcare and remote areas and realize they join the military and then they end up in whatever. Like Koring all Valley administering healthcare and remote areas and realize like healthcare delivery

is totally different than what they thought and so they come back and they wanna start something new and whatever, et cetera, et cetera. And so you look at their resume and you're kinda like, hmm, they're all over the place. And then you learn from people they worked with and you learn more about their story and what you realize is like they are making pivots in response to their learned experience.

And so they are compiling this like roster of different experiences and interests because when something happens that it gives them new ideas or changes their mind, they respond to it. And I think that's exactly what we should want instead of saying stay this linear course no matter what you learn by being alive, right? The thing is they downplay it sometimes. You have to sort of drag it out of them. So when I get these questions about people, say, well, I do have more interest and more

things I want to do, but employers don't want to hear that. The way the winning Tillman scholars solve that is they turn those that what could look like a scattered journey into a narrative with steps that make sense because of what they learned. And so I think that's a good way to approach it. Yeah, and I mean, that's the military path. Obviously, for Pat Tillman, it was going from sports to military, but I've worked with this great organization.

It's called American DreamU. And it's some crazy number, like how many people transition out of the military every year, it's like hundreds of thousands of people every year, like we're in the military and now they're not in the military. And now they have to figure out how to do something else, right? Because there's no private nuclear submarines

that they can command, right? Like they have to find a different job. And I advise another startup called Shift, which is all about basically doing that. How do you translate your skills from the armed forces, which are often very specialized and sort of very particular, but also world class and elite? How do you take that and apply it to something else?

And I think ultimately they are what I've found going around to sports teams and talking to the military and companies and whatever, is that elite performance is elite performance and that the culture of these organizations is arguably very similar. Like my sort of hero as a multi-hyphen, it is Bruce Dickens and the lead singer of Iron Maiden. This guy's like the singer in the greatest heavy metal band

of all time, also a professional airline pilot, also makes the British Olympic fencing team at some point, right? And like a bunch of other stuff. And it's like you go like, these are totally different things. How could you possibly do all that? I think it's because the culture of what it takes to master fencing can't be that different

than whatever the culture among the hours required to be an airline pilot versus what it takes to dedicate your life to music. I think it's like if you can figure out whatever that thing is that helps you master one thing, you can apply it to other things. Yeah, there's no question there's transferable skills, transferable habits. And I think one of the main ones to mention something specific is self-regulatory learning, which sounds complicated, but in many ways boils down

to reflection, like doing something and reflecting on what you did to try to figure out where you need more work. And I think there are principles like that that we're running across anything we're doing. David, thank you so much. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcasts, listening apps.

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