Why General Learning Beats Specialization
when you look more more deeply uh
they're not as clearcut as we tend to think well I I learned this myself when
I I didn't know this as as the rule
but I I found the story of lomachenko
because I I my friend of mine
brought me ringside to a fight in New York City and I sat at the side of the
Ring watching this guy called Vil lenko that I'd never
seen in my life and I just couldn't
believe his footwork I'd never seen
anything like it in my life and then
I after the fight he won the fight of course after the fight I looked into his
win record and it was something like
he'd won 300 of his amateur fights and only ever lost one and then he' gone
back and beat the guy that he had lost
against um and in my mind I'd never
seen a boxer like it ever and then when I read into your work you've mentioned
him
as well as being one of these
examples that had a really varied early upbringing didn't just focus on boxing
and that's ultimately what made his
skill stack so unusual and therefore probably what made him the best his
story surprised even me where he
took several years off to learn dance like d i mean I wouldn't
usually expect someone to take years
off it's just sort of do things in those same years so that was amazing but his
father's called Anatoli and I think
it was his father that took him off into Yeah dance classes or something and
then
let him go back to boxing so for
your perspective child I wouldn't say like don't expose them to soccer I think
because I think a lot of this is I
think there's there's a few things going there are three buckets of things
going on
with why this delayed specialization
Works in sports one is match quality again the degree of fit between who you
are and what you do is that about
passion like what you're passionate about ability and interests both and the
earlier you force selection the more
likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot so especially when selection
is way pre puberty okay you're probably
putting people in the wrong my kid
might want to be a boxer but I'm forcing him to be a soccer player and he might
miss
his potential with boxing premature
optimization yeah okay and and that's also why we often see on junior teams
the relative age effect you know
where kids born earlier in their Birth Cohort are way over represented on
Junior and
youth national teams because when
they're eight or whatever and selected if they're eight and 10 months versus
just turned eight that's a huge
difference of development in that age and coaches mistake that biological
maturation for talent and so youth teams
are overloaded with kids born early
in their youth cohort and also in school especially boys if they're younger in
their age C are much more likely to
get diagnosed with ahd but they're just acting like the younger boys that they
are um okay and so and then that
disappears at the top level so it's not it's not a good thing so there's the
relative age effect that's one or
premature you know choosing there's injury which is we now see a lot of
adult style overuse injuries in kids
and the main predictor of that is nine months a year of one sport and one sport
only so this isn't about less Sports
there seems to be a protective effect of diversifying that is separate from
just
doing less but actually you know
balancing yourself out in some way but then there's a skill learning Advantage
where it's similar to language where
you know kids who grow up in a like with multiple languages they will often
show
a little delay in some of their
language skills but that delay is totally wiped out in the long run and they
have an advantage for subsequently learning
other languages looks very similar
in a lot of these skills where if you're diversifying there may be some delay
but
you have an advantage for picking up
other skills later on and I don't think this is about whether you're putting on
a basketball jersey or a football jersey
I think it's about variability in
your problem solving which is why I think so many of the great footballers grew
up on
fotsa where what's foots it's foot's
with a small ball soccer like game with a small ball um I think I think the the
Brazilian name is like football day
Salo which it means like football in a room small ball stays on the ground
played in
a small space and kids will be
playing on you know cobblestones one day and concrete the next day and and it's
like
in a phone booth you know at hypers
speed and so there's no no one's drifting down the field and everyone's
having to judge even if you don't
have the ball pick up on body movements to try to anticipate what's coming next
and the
touches are about six times as
frequent uh as in as in full scale football and so I think it engenders a lot
more of
this sort of variability um than
does just sort of the full scale game it makes your
reactions a lot faster as well you
have to make decisions faster with the ball but under yeah it's funny when
you're talking about the tiger example and why
people um broadcast that story more
than they broadcast what you consider to be
the the average which is just people
having this varied upbringing and then eventually finding one thing and taking
it forward it made me think that from my
The Risks Of
Specializing Too Early
experience people broadcast that
they basically broadcast anything that's the exception because it's the
exception so
the story of you know tiger WS as
one example but the on the other side with
someone like Anthony Joshua who
started boxing at I'm going to Butch of this but let's say
24 I hear that all the time because
it's so unusual that he would become world
champion but start at 24 and the
other story that you hear all the time is like the child prodigy story of like
I don't
know Michael Jackson or Tiger Woods
that started when they were two you don't hear about the person that starts at
like 15 right because it's not
interesting right because it's the
norm right or who ramps up in sort of a normal way if they started because
early
exposure is great yeah early
exposure is good but yeah and and it's a little it's a little more equivocal
right it's a
it's less of a prescription also
like so when when someone starts late we think they defied the odds this is
amazing and
when someone starts early that's a
very easy example to emulate and so I think a
lot of it is about that ease we
referenced the word match quality but also we talked about passion a little
bit which kind of is one factor of
match quality a lot of people are trying to figure out what they should be
aiming at
in their life and they one of the
most popular questions I get from young people is um how do I find my passion
how do I know what it is or at least
like what's the process def finding it and it's they refer to it as if it's
this sort of Easter egg that one of them
and have to find it there's not one
and it's singular passion is a singular word yeah no I don't I first of all I
think
losing the idea that it is sing I
mean that's like the idea that there's like a single soulmate out there for you
you
know and I mean obviously I found my
single soulmate but for most of the rest of
you uh there's a lot of things you
might be interested in in
fact the more things you try you'll
probably figure out the more things that that you're interested in I was just I
was just like last week spending a
little time I was at the Pentagon spending uh some time with a lieutenant
general who helped with a program
they call talent-based branching there where they were losing a lot of their
the
people they identified as The
Highest Potential were leaving the the Army and they started this pilot program
called
talent-based branching where instead
of saying here's your path you know here's your your career path get uper out
they'd pair them with sort of a
coach like figure and they'd have them dabble in like five different career
paths a little bit reflect on it with their
coach take some tests how this fits
you they have to keep track of the Reflections in online portal again
self-regulatory learning got to do it
explicitly and in that process 90%
of the army Cadets who went through
that process changed their career
preference 90 and this is just from a little bit of dabbling because you don't
know what's out there you don't know
what the opportunities are and that and you know it helped retention so people
were more likely to stay if they
find better fit this is I think actually one of the really important things
about um and I'll I'll Circle back back
to Passion a little bit there but
when we think about grit right which everyone
thinks of is I think about this and
the reason that the Army made me think about it my semantic network is that the
most
famous grit research was done at
West Point at the United States military academy by Angela Duckworth and her
colleagues and it found that the grit
survey the grit survey is a 12
question survey half the points are awarded for consistency of interests not
changing
what you're interested in and half
the points for Persistence of effort or perseverance turns out to be a good
predictor of who would get through
this very rigorous orientation at West Point called Beast also has some
predictive value for
who would graduate so just to give
you some context for the listeners that from the way that I understood this is
that
Angela Duckworth did this study to
basically figure out what it was that made people more likely to get through
this very rigorous selection process at
an army barracks or something and
she determined that this this grit as she she called it was the thing that
allowed
people to be successful so from that
study I've heard this all over the place that actually what makes people successful
even in my team is great yeah
yeah and that survey turned out to
be a better predictor than were some traditional metrics of who would get
through Beast like test scores and stuff
like that it also had some value for
who would get through the military academy
as did some of those traditional
metrics but tons of those like since about the mid1 1990s those very gritty
cadets at West Point have been
almost half of them have been quitting almost on the day that they allow they
have a 5-year active duty service commitment
after they graduate and almost half
of them have been quitting and so the army at a certain point said oh we've got
a
millennial grit problem you know
like too much avocado toast not enough mortgages or like
whatever and then some scientists
who also officers decided to study the problem and they said we don't we
haven't gotten a grit problem
overnight we've got a match quality problem right
when the Army looked like the rest
of the economy where it was more upper out and you fac the same kind of
problems
year-over-year and you could have a
period of training followed by a period of working doing similar things lateral
Mobility was limited
that was fine it just mimicked the
rest of the economy then you move into this whatever you want to call it
knowledge creativity information economy and
people who can engage in Creative
problem solving and knowledge creation have tremendous lad Mobility they have
lots of opportunities these young people
are learning things about themselves
in the early 20s and they have no agency over career switching to match it so
they were just quitting right when the
Army first didn't realize this so
they threw retention bonuses at people and the ones were going to stay
took it ones are goingon to leave
left anyway half billion dollars taxpayer money didn't didn't uh fix the
problem
but what I think it shows is that
how limited your insight into what you might want to do is based on the things
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