The Exchanges, every show

Q What specifically were you criticizing Gladwell about? What, what, what was the substance of what you were saying he was wrong about?

A Yeah. In my first book, I was criticizing the research underlying the so-called 10,000 hours rule, and then his popularization of it. The idea that the only route to exceptional performance is through 10,000 hours, so-called deliberate practice, highly technical, effortful practice. Um, and we, that brought us together for a debate with specifically about sports development at this thing called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. And there I said, you know, The data that actually track, yes, elite athletes spend more time in deliberate practice than lower level athletes, but the studies that track them over the course of their development show that early on they spent less time In deliberate practice in that activity than peers who plateau at lower levels. They have what scientists call a sampling period. Broad variety of activities where you learn general skills, now called physical literacy. You learn about your own interests and abilities, and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And so, he acknowledged when we were coming off stage, he said, that does not fit. With, with what I thought, why don't we run together? We were in Boston when we're back in New York tomorrow, because we'd both been national level middle distance runners, and we'll talk about it on our own time. And so we started running together every weekend, and we came to…

AI assessment note: “I was criticizing the research underlying the so-called 10,000 hours rule”

Q So I'm, I'm just curious because there's, and this really feeds into the, the conceit of inside the box, how constraints make us better. Um, You, you have extraordinary range. You could choose almost anything to write about. How do you decide what your next book is? How did you pick this as a subject?

A Oh, yeah, you're, you're hitting an almost, almost what I would call a sore spot here a little bit, because One of the reasons I did this book is because I, I was terrible at putting constraints on myself and in my own work. And so after range, I, I was able to become independent as a writer. And I said, gosh, books are so much work. Um, I'm not doing it again unless I find the perfect topic. And I have such wide interest that I was like dabbling in all these different topics and never picking. And then I came across this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the researcher who coined the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity. And he was talking about marriage, but I think you could apply what he was saying to anything. He said, you know, the great thing about being committed by your own choice to something is that you can stop wondering how to live and start spending your energy living instead of wondering what's always around the corner. And I was like, man, that's what I'm doing with book topics right now. I'm just, I have a bunch of stuff I'm fascinated in, but I keep saying, well, what's around the corner? And one of those things I was fascinated in was constraints. And, and then reading that quote, it, it dawned on me that I needed this help myself. And I said, I'm writing a proposal on this tomorrow, and of course, two weeks later, I'm 10 times as int…

AI assessment note: “reading that quote, it dawned on me that I needed this help myself.”

Q Was there a point along the way in researching and writing the book where you, you had a crisis of confidence that this was the right thing to be writing about? Or did, did the, no, yes. That's a yes. That's a big yes.

A Always. Oh my gosh. Adam Grant, you know, the psychologist tells me, I, I was, I, at some point I was talking to him about the, my ideas in the book, and he said, you're a defensive pessimist. You think, which basically, I, I had not heard that before. He said, you think every, every one of your ideas, like, you get excited about it, then you're sure it's going to fail, and then you work really hard to make it not fail. I guess that's what a defensive pessimist is, but no, I absolutely go through this phase where I think something's Fascinating. It's gonna work. I'm so fired up. And then there's a phase where it's just, what did I get myself into? I can't believe I thought this was gonna work. I start taking my own books down from the shelf and looking at them being like, I know this is possible because this thing is in my hands right here.

AI assessment note: “Always. Oh my gosh. Adam Grant, you know, the psychologist tells me”

Q David, you, you, you train to be a scientist. Most of us in business, uh, are not trained that way. What can business leaders learn from scientists to be better at, at leading their teams and, and building their, their organizations?

A Yeah, I think there's a certain kind of adaptability, um, an ability to pivot that they can learn from scientists. And in fact, There's some research I go into in Inside the Box where different founders were trained in different types of market research, evaluating their value proposition. And some of them were randomized to get trained in, in a scientific method version of this, where they make a hypothesis about what do they think is their value add. And then they have to commit to a way to go test it. And some decision rule, you know, ah, they measure, are they right or wrong? And, and the companies that got that kind of training very often found out that some assumption they made about the value they were providing was wrong. They had not read the market right. They had not read their customers right. And they often pivoted and were much more likely to succeed. Whereas the ones that got kind of the standard training were much more likely to basically retrofit Whatever they heard to their story and, and pivoted much more rarely. So I think prospectively making a hypothesis about what you're trying to do, that scientists need to be better about this too, right? This is one of the reasons so much scientific work hasn't replicated because scientists haven't been as good about prospectively making their prediction and sticking to it. Prospectively making a prediction, even if th…

AI assessment note: “there's a certain kind of adaptability, um, an ability to pivot that they can learn”

Q um, uh, constraints imposed on me when I was a public defender, for sure. Um, I had a lot fewer constraints imposed on me when I worked at MySpace and MySpace's heyday or at the National Football League. Um, is there a difference in, in leading teams where the constraints are imposed from the outside? Um, they're real, they're, they're unavoidable versus the ones that you create for your team?

A Yeah, I mean, I think yes and no, because I think in either case, um, constraints can do two of the great things they do, which is force you to clarify priorities or launch you into productive exploration, or both at the same time. So to give an example, one of the early readers of, of this book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was NASA's chief knowledge officer, sort of like a Uh, psychologist who's supposed to ensure there's institutional memory, basically, uh, for, it was created when NASA had some mistakes and, and a position that they had to have. And Ed said, oh, let me tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where engineers ended up with half the time and half the money that they expected. And so what did they do? Well, they whined and complained a little, and then they said, if we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it? And they couldn't build from scratch, so they had to borrow technology, so they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. And so it was really successful, and they never would have thought that way otherwise. Now, if it had been a quarter of the time and money, instead of a half, would they have been able to do it? I don't know where exactly that line is. I mean, I think if you get to a line and you're so constrained Whether by outside forces or …

AI assessment note: “I think yes and no, because I think in either case, um, constraints can”

Q and, and they unlock, and this really unlocked in a meaningful way. Um, but we are in this AI era where, um, We can take on a lot more work because we can have agents doing it on our behalf or doing 7080, 90, 99% of it on our behalf. Are we in a different moment now? Like, should we be rethinking this indigestion and starvation equation in this moment?

A Yeah, it's an interesting question. And so, first of all, I think there, there's, there's infinite ability now to start a million things that we're not going to finish. And, and I think A lot of people have been doing that, right? The, the, the potential obviously of AI, I mean, I've, it's cut certain things that I do from 10 hours into one hour, right? So I'm a fan. But, um, at the same time I've spent over the last year, spent some time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. And one of the things I've noticed in, in that experience, you know, just sort of doing it for my own research and understanding purposes, was that a lot of these companies are implementing in this sprawling fashion. Basically. And they, they know they need to do it. They need to do it fast. Everyone else is doing it. And so they're implementing and it's leading to a lot of what researchers are starting to call work slop, you know, just like tons of volume of stuff that is unclear exactly if it's addressing the strategy or not. And the companies that seemed to do it more successfully, again, from the ones that I was exposed to, were first defining a problem really well. And once that problem was defined, well, what tool matches this problem? Or, or a few of the organizations would do what they called mapping the jobs to be done. And what are the actual jobs that need to be…

AI assessment note: “there's infinite ability now to start a million things that we're not going to finish”