{"id":1049,"date":"2019-10-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/reports\/david-epstein-explains-how-sport-can-become-a-better-predictor-of-talent\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:12:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:12:27","slug":"david-epstein-predicting-talent","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/david-epstein-predicting-talent\/","title":{"rendered":"David Epstein Explains How Sport Can Become a Better Predictor of Talent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n Oct 18, 2019 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

David Epstein Explains How Sport Can Become a Better Predictor of Talent<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Leadership & Culture<\/a> <\/div>\n
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https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/david-epstein-predicting-talent\/<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n
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The author explains that dabbling in sampling periods that create a broader capacity for problem-solving can lead to greater long-term talent development, even if that comes with some short-term pain.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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David Epstein<\/a> returned to Leaders stage in June and cited a fellow speaker in explaining his theory that generalists are better placed to thrive than early specialists in most fields.<\/h4>\n
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By John Portch<\/h6>\n

\u201cBrad Sheehan<\/a> mentioned some things yesterday that I really loved,\u201d says Epstein of Delta Air Lines\u2019 Managing Director of Flight Safety, who had spoken the previous day at Atlanta\u2019s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Just because you\u2019ve had a lot of reps doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019ve learned the right lessons\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Epstein, whose 2013 bestselling book The Sports Gene<\/em><\/a> challenged the notion of the \u201810,000-hour rule\u2019 for achieving mastery in elite sport, was in Atlanta to explore the themes raised in his latest book: Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s central sporting tenet is that a tennis champion such as Roger Federer, who eschewed early specialisation, is a more common paradigm in sport than his golfing counterpart Tiger Woods, who was introduced to the sport by his father when he was two years old.<\/p>\n

Yet both men became the best in their respective sports. Epstein does not ignore the mercurial nature of talent development but proposes the notion that generalists tend to be better-placed to succeed than early specialists across a range of fields, of which sport is but one.<\/p>\n

In the first of two articles exploring Epstein\u2019s presentation at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit, the Leaders Performance Institute focuses on his Roger-Tiger comparison and the value of \u2018range\u2019 in analogical problem-solving in environments as disparate as science labs and the offices of comic books.<\/p>\n

Elite athletes tend to have a \u2018sampling period\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMy question was: which model was the norm?\u201d says Epstein. \u201cThe Tiger Woods story is the one we know; Roger Federer is every bit as famous but we don\u2019t know his story and it turns out that the Roger pattern is the norm; it\u2019s not ubiquitous but it is the norm across sports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Federer, as Epstein illustrates, played a range of sports in childhood through adolescence and inadvertently indulged in what he terms a \u2018sampling period\u2019. \u201c[The likes of Federer] play a variety of sports whether formally or informally, with lots of unstructured play; they learn these broader skills that scaffold later technical skills; they learn about their interests, they learn about their abilities, and they systematically delay specialising until later than their peers.\u201d<\/p>\n

It stands to reason that the 15-year-old Woods was a better golfer than Federer was a tennis player and Epstein does not doubt that Woods was always destined for the top of his sport.<\/p>\n

He says: \u201cSome people who talk about skills acquisition would talk to me about golf as if it were an industrial task essentially \u2013 you\u2019re trying to learn a known movement over and over with as little deviation as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Golf appears to lend itself to early specialisation but, \u201ca lot of sports are not like that; the challenge changes, it speeds up as you go forward and so I think it\u2019s better to think of a classic research finding that I think of as \u2018breadth of training predicts breath of transfer\u2019 \u2013 the \u2018transfer\u2019 being the term psychologists use to take knowledge and skills and apply them to problems you\u2019ve never quite seen before, which is what we care about in a lot of our sports.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat predicts our ability to do that is the breadth of challenges you face early on in your training.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy speculation is that this is what is coming out of their sampling period in many cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more analogies the better<\/strong><\/p>\n

Epstein\u2019s discussion of analogical problem-solving \u2013 where analogies from other domains can help to solve problems we are working on \u2013 is perhaps the best advertisement for the Leaders Sport Performance Summit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really apropos to this meeting, to Leaders,\u201d begins the man who also spoke at the 2014 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019re doing here, and I\u2019ve seen this meeting evolve over the years, where it\u2019s moved out of sports and brought in a lot of people from Delta, from the military, and ballet dancers, is looking for analogies from other domains. And it turns out to be an incredibly powerful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

He reflects on his time spent with Kevin Niall Dunbar, Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park.<\/p>\n

Dunbar, who features in Range<\/em>, is noted for his studies into creative problem-solving in scientific labs. \u201cWhat he found,\u201d says Epstein, \u201cis that most breakthrough problem-solving comes when something goes wrong in an experiment, something unexpected.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen there\u2019s a lab meeting and at first people think \u2018our equipment is not calibrated right\u2019 so they keep trying; but if these anomalies keep showing up then they have to say \u2018well, what do we do now?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThe chances of them going from that to a breakthrough increased with the number of analogies that they were able to make from similarly-structured problems in other domains; and the number and range of analogies they were able to make had to do with the breadth of experience of the people in the lab group behind them.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Epstein wrote in Range<\/em>: \u2018When the going got uncertain, breadth made the difference.\u2019<\/p>\n

Comic book genres and knowledge integration<\/strong><\/p>\n

Epstein then shifts the scene to a recent presentation he gave at the Pat Tillman Foundation. For those unfamiliar with the charity, since its foundation in 2008, it has provided academic scholarships, professional development opportunities and a national network to empower military service members, veterans and spouses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018gosh, what will I talk about?\u2019\u201d he recalls, \u201cbecause I was a college track athlete and one of my training partners was a Tillman scholar; and I said \u2018they\u2019re all career changing so I\u2019ll talk about late specialisation in sport but I\u2019d better look at something other than sport at the end.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tacked on ten minutes at the end; I shared a study about comic book creators where a group of industrial researchers looked at what causes or makes creators more likely to create breakthrough comic books that become worth a ton of value.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results surprised the researchers. \u201c[They said] it\u2019ll of course be years of experience in the industry \u2013 that turned out to be wrong. The resources of the publisher \u2013 that turned out to be wrong too. The number of previous comics they\u2019d made \u2013 also wrong. It turned out that the number of different genres they had worked in was the best predictor of who would create a breakout.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the young Roger Federer dabbled in different sports so these creators had enjoyed analogous experiences. The Swiss may not have been a world-beater in his teens but would dominate the sport, accruing 20-grand slam titles in the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you looked at team creators,\u201d continues Epstein, \u201cearly with narrow experience, you could recreate a broad individual with a team; if an individual had worked across three genres you were better off having a team of three genre specialists \u2013 they would produce better.\u201d<\/p>\n

The picture changes when genre experience extends from three to five. \u201cAfter five genres the individual flew by, [they] became the most important unit of knowledge integration; it could no longer be created by a team or a platoon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this says to me is that these people who are gaining broad skills, their performance suffers early on and they need a period of experimentation and a period of gaining these skills that will allow their long-term development to cross over teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s one of the underlying themes of Range<\/em> that was deeply counterintuitive to me; the idea that thing can do to cause the fastest short-term improvement can sometimes undermine optimal long-term development.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n

\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author explains that dabbling in sampling periods that create a broader capacity for problem-solving can lead to greater long-term talent development, even if that comes with some short-term pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1050,"menu_order":0,"template":"","categories":[20],"pathway":[],"topic":[],"sport":[],"class_list":["post-1049","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership-culture-performance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDavid Epstein Explains How Sport Can Become a Better Predictor of Talent - Performance Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/david-epstein-predicting-talent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"David Epstein Explains How Sport Can Become a Better Predictor of Talent - 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