Use These Powerful Thinking Tools To Solve Your Hardest Problems with David Epstein

In this episode we discuss powerful thinking tools and strategies you can use to break through tough problems and give yourself confidence and clarity when you’re dealing with uncertain situations. We share the breakthrough strategy that was used to invent astrophysics, explore how you can make tough life and career choices, and show you how you can use quick experiments to test, learn, and get results quickly. We share all of this and much more in with our guest David Epstein. David Epstein is the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica  and as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, writing some of their most high-profile investigative stories.We don’t teach the skill of actually THINKING in today’s world. There’s a HUGE advantage in connecting ideas and learning how to think broadly, especially as people specialize more. The more and more people specialize the more powerful range and broad thinking becomes. For much of the 20th century most of progress was driven by specialization, but beginning in the 1980s, most breakthroughs started coming from multidisciplinary combinations and breadth, not depth. The “cult of the head start” - the drive to specialize as narrowly and as early as possible. What can we learn from the story of Tiger Woods? Traditional chess is an activity where early specialization is really important. Moraveck’s paradox - humans and machines have opposite strengths and weaknesses.In freestyle chess, you outsource the pattern study to the computer, and you focus on the higher level strategy - it becomes a completely different game. That’s what has happened to success in today’s world.“A broader set of integrative skills” is where humans can add the most value. How “wicked learning environments” like business, investing, medicine, and human interaction are much trickier to navigate, and