#206: We live in a society that values career specialization. You’re not a “doctor” -- you’re a pediatrician, an anesthesiologist, an oncologist. You’re not a “lawyer” -- you practice family law, or bankruptcy, or criminal law. You’re not an “engineer” -- you’re an electrical engineer who specializes in solar technologies, or a civil engineer who specializes in the application of artificial intelligence in highway traffic design. Specialization is beneficial and necessary, but specializing too early in life or too narrowly can also have drawbacks. According to today’s podcast guest, New York Times bestselling author David Epstein, overspecialization can stifle innovation if we’re all digging in parallel trenches. Sampling a broad range of subjects prior to specializing (e.g. at the undergraduate level, or as a hobby) allows people to make connections between far-flung domains and ideas. If you’re an athlete, spend your childhood playing a variety of sports before you commit to the one you’d like to develop. If you’re a musician, try learning different instruments before you pick your primary focus. If you’re bound for a graduate degree in a STEM field, consider a multidisciplinary undergraduate that pulls from chemistry, physics, biology and perhaps even art. Specialization can come later. We hear stories of people who specialized early in life. Tiger Woods won his first golf competition at age two, beating everyone in the age-10-and-under category. Many world chess champions started training in early childhood. The notion is that early specialization provides a headstart; if you haven’t started training at chess or golf by age 12, it might be too late. But chess and golf are limited in their scope. They’re contained games with fixed, predictable rules. In the wider world, in which challenges and assumptions fluctuate and problems are ill-defined, being a generalist is a lifehack. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode206 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

#204: You make decisions on a daily basis about your career, family, friendships, health and investments; these choices shape your life. But how much have you thought about how to think? There are common threads and collective wisdom across disciplines. These common threads create mental models, which are frameworks for understanding the world. Mental models allow us to apply insights from a variety of unrelated fields, using reasoning by analogy to make better choices about our lives. For example: Critical mass is a concept from physics that can be applied to our understanding of microeconomics or entrepreneurship. The availability heuristic and filter bubble are concepts that we can use to check in with ourselves whenever we’re assessing risk in our businesses, careers or personal safety. Loss aversion and information aversion are notions that, when articulated, allow us to understand why we hesitate to learn more about investing during recessions. Mental models can make us better thinkers. Warren Buffett’s business partner, Charlie Munger, says he relies on mental models to evaluate businesses and make investing choices. What we know is that we’ll never be right. But mental models can help us become less wrong. On today’s episode, Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann join us to discuss Super Thinking, their book about how to use mental models to improve the skill of thinking. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode204  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices