Why specializing early doesn't always mean career success

You’ve heard of the so-called 10,000-hour rule, but probably not about the mountain of research that shows that, from elite athletes to Nobel laureates, early specialization is the exception, not the rule. (Sports fans are often skeptical of this, so a long list of the research in various sports can be found in the citations.) This book was an attempt to synthesize all of that work and make it applicable to a fast-changing world. Word of advice: don’t feel behind.

This film is a fascinating look at the childhood of the remarkable Polgar sisters. Combining archival footage and recent interviews, you needn’t be interested in chess to marvel at this window into the lives of three trailblazing women.

Ellington is most famous for his big band compositions of the 1930s, like “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If it Ain’t Got that Swing).” But he creatively reinvented himself repeatedly over half a century, with everything from movie scores to a symphony that evoked African American history and premiered at Carnegie Hall. Give the two masterworks (here and here, respectively) a listen, and you’ll hear a much more contemporary Ellington, one you may not have known existed.

If you’d asked me a few years ago about things I’d never do, “read a thousand-page book twice” might have been high on the list. This book proved me wrong. A decade of research went into this stunning biography. Naifeh and Smith, who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Jackson Pollock, trace the peregrinations of a painter whose work served as a bridge to modern art. And because the authors didn’t want it to distract from the rest of the book, they waited for an appendix to detail all that is known about Van Gogh’s death, including their assertion that he almost certainly did not die by suicide.

Ibarra is a professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, and has deeply studied how people make successful (and unsuccessful) career transitions. This book details how those transitions actually happen — not by pure introspection that limns a perfect path forward, but via an accumulation of small personal experiments. (“Act and then think,” as Ibarra puts it.) As someone who has changed directions a few times, it resonated deeply with me.

Hogarth is the psychologist who coined “kind” and “wicked” learning environments, which help explain why narrowly specialized practice leads to improvement in some domains, but not in others. The book is intended for an academic audience, but it’s accessible for an interested reader who wants to understand how to improve the way they improve. (The paper “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A failure to disagree” by Kahneman and Klein, is also a good read mentioning the kind/wicked dichotomy.)

Luria travelled to remote reaches of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s to take advantage of a remarkable natural experiment. Isolated villages of subsistence farmers and herders were being forced through social and economic changes that would normally occur over generations. Luria studied populations undergoing that transformation (as well as those that had yet to), to learn if and how modernization would impact cognitive processes. Among the many tasks he used to study his subjects was the Ebbinghaus illusion (the diagram in this talk with all the circles).

“Medical reversal” is the term Dr. Prasad and Dr. Cifu coined to describe instances in which the presumed efficacy of a medical practice is overturned by evidence that shows it is either ineffective, dangerous, or both. Medical reversals are distressingly common, in part because medical therapies frequently enter practice based on preliminary evidence and because they seem logical; only later does rigorous evidence show that they don’t work. In this fascinating book (written for the general public), Prasad and Cifu detail the causes of medical reversal, with hyper-specialization among them.

The comic shown in the talk isn’t just any comic. From the mid-1950s to 1970, the comic book industry employed a self-censorship body (the Comics Code Authority) after psychiatrist Fredric Wertham convinced Congress that comics were causing children to become deviants. Then in 1971, the U.S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare asked Stan Lee to help educate the public about drug abuse. Lee wrote Spider-Man #96, the start of a story arc that led to Peter Parker’s best friend overdosing on pills. The comic was not approved by the CCA. Marvel published anyway, and it was so well received that censorship standards were immediately relaxed, and the creative floodgates swung open.