[inaudible conversations] good morning and welcome to the 19th annual National Book festival brought to you by the library of congress. [applause] this festival is free of charge thanks to the generosity of donors large and small. He. Please make it brief and to the point, you are giving us permission to use it to web cast and finally i ask that you please turn off your cell phones, thank you and enjoy your day. Good morning, book lovers, how are you . Can we stop for a moment and acknowledge the librarian, hardworking staff and the volunteers . Absolutely. [applause] im chairman for the National Endowment of humanities, we proud to continue partnership of National Book festival, topic of this festival, changemakers and one way we are doing so is to discuss topic on the bottom level of the Convention Center, theyll we will recognize importance of 19th document, documentary on pbs, we have wonderful cutouts of Suffrage Movement, leaders that you can pose with, grandchildren, Fredrik Douglas and others, alexander hamilton, Popular Figures weve had in the past as well and we will have programming about civics and importance of library but for this room and this moment, we are here through funding of this pavilion understanding our world and our federal Agency Awards more than 130 million a year through the generosity of the taxpayers to libraries and museums, universities, scholars, Civic Leaders across the nation and here we join you not just as one of your voices here in cultural funding but as leaders, your day as our day will be presented with fascinating presenters and theyll be books signed by authors, meeting with fellow book lovers and treasure hunts, of course, for children. So we are delighted to start the activities with the author David Epstein and engaging thoroughly new book, range, david is investigative reporter, graduate of colombia university, he majored in Environmental Science and atron astronomy, masters degree in Environmental Science and journalism, he served as Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated, investigative reporting, technology that many of you have seen and about technology and Sports Performance certainly worth your consideration and he writes in the book, the challenge we face now is how to maintain the benefits of diverse experience, delayed concentration, in a world that increasingly incentivizes and even demands hyperspecialization, if thats the challenge, then i would say, indeed, that range answers the question, so please welcome david and my colleague the honorable andy who will conduct the interview. Thank you. [applause] welcome, david, im hoping that you think im a journalists because these are my notes that i will try to use to draw questions from, you have so much in your book, youre a story teller which is fascinating because this is a book about leadership, how to become a leader, how to, well, how to become somebody who takes in many, many experiences and solves problems, so for me, i was fascinated to see not only great stories, great examples, so much data, but the data sneaks in and you find yourself remembering all of your points, not particularly because of the data but some of the stories, so what i will pull some of the prompts out of the book so you can tell the stories because they are fascinating. I also wanted to give you a shoutout for talking about francis, she is alive which you tell me, 103, the woman who saved the girl scouts and her ability to help shape leaders was recognized by peter who called her the greatest ceo of all time, basically and i know that youve been influenced by her but youve taken it a whole step further, so without further due, i was wondering if we could start out with the stories with repetition, when you play sports and youre a sports writer, we need to keep practicing a certain thing, practicing, practicing but youre saying thats not always the best thing to do so, theres your first pitch. Thank you very much, we should come back to francis because she had a big influence on me. We would love to hear about it. The book start in sports because the seed came out of kind of of debate that i had with malcolm when i wrote about a book about Sports Science previously when i was at Sports Illustrated and critique to the science underlying the socalled 10,000 hours rule, we had to introduce each other, this is David Epstein who devoted first pages of the book criticizing my work. [laughter] little bit of a hairing introduction. So we were invited at conference at mit and he wrote about the importance of practice, repeat the same thing over and over and i was the Science Writer at Sports Illustrated and said let me go look at the data, in almost every sport around the world, scientists call a sampling period, wide variety of sports, broad general skills early on, later technical skills, they learn about their own interests and ability and systemically delayed specializing until later than their peers and thats the norm, but we never really hear that story, what we hear is the tiger woods story, essentially, and sort of, you know, very selective version of it where he was, you know, 7 months old his father gave him a putter, just giving it him as toy, hes on national tv golfing, 3 years old, im going to be the next great at 21 and greatest golfer in the world and as i argue in the book, probably most powerful modern story and extrapolated and golf is worst human model that people want to learn. [laughter] we have been making a really dangerous extrappulation from gofl. Well, tell the story about repetition all of the time. Hardest structural writing challenge ive ever faced but Smoke Jumpers who parachute in to big fires, to contain them, highperformance teams but psychologist would noticed when they would face something unexpected, for example, they would be on a hillside and they would be ordered to jump tools and run away from fire and they would refuse and what he noticed when these these what he called highreliability organizations, when that would happen because it was something obvious to an outsider. Hundreds of pounds of equipment and maybe within 100 feet from safety and what he realized was happening that when training was very repetitive, that was really good as long as you were facing the same situation over and over again but when something changed, you get stuck in the pattern and do the same thing anyway, so the firefighters would refuse to drop their tools even though it would have saved their life and he started to see in all sorts of areas, most of commercial air disasters occur when the flight crews sticks to initial plan they have done before, even when random outsider is clear that they are heading for disaster or, for example, he said carl who was walking on tight rope, instead of grabbing the rope below, balance pole, he fell trying to grab pole instead of wire that is could have saved him. Its a proxy for being flexible in the face of Something Different and that gets me me to writing, youre ability to take your skills and knowledge and apply them to a situation you havent quite seen before or something changes and what predicts your ability to do that is a diversity of experience that is you had during training, you had to be very careful about going things 10,000 away unless you are engaged in activity like golf which are kind environment that we can talk about it. I was fascinating in your chapter how the wicked world was made when you Start Talking about iq. When i was growing up that was it, everything got judged by iq and in your chapter you say iq has gotten higher everywhere, i dont feel special anymore. You should feel special. [laughter] everyone who came before you oh, okay. But, yes, its not just iqs have gone up, its effect, iqs have gone up points in decade, they didnt just go up, they went up where they were least expected to go up. Theres a test that its just abstract patterns and one is missing, and you have to deduce the rules and this is created what is culturally reduced, nothing you learned in life and school should have affect ability to do well on test. If martians landed on earth, we could give them this test to see how clever they are, in fact, that turned out the least favorable test, it turns out that it has to do with the way our minds have changed to accommodate modern work, some of the studies illuminated how this happened and looked at experiment in soviet union n remote areas, Agricultural Land and they took what had been farmers living in premodern conditions and started forcing some of them to engage in modern work, they had to coordinate with other people, think about peoples work that they didnt actually do, so they had to start thinking about their own experience to coordinate work and some of the people were still in the condition because the change was spreading and a group of psychologists went and studied them and found that the people who were still in premodern situation, their thinking wasnt worse, it was adapt today a different situation where they had to rely on very concrete experience, they would be asked Something Like where its cold and snow all the bears are white and they would say what colors are the bears, you could never get them to extrapolate outed of their own experience, people had to think about work that they dont do, it completely changed how their minds were and get better at grouping things even though they had never experienced them and we continued to go where we have to live by whats called transfer, taking our knowledge and applying to situations that we havent seen, work that we havent done before, thats how we get by, we take it for granted and caused us to get much better at deducing rules essentially when they are not there and its changed very opportunity mentally the way we think, so particularly on the abstract parts of iq tests, by the way, this is a side point, but i think the effect is good measure in some ways of gender equity in society, dosage of modern life, some society where women are less allowed you see effect separating. It can be indirect measure of gender equity in the society. I dont know if youre aware that on weekend here in washington in government buildings, of course, we would love people to be working even on weekend they turn off the airconditioning and turn off the heat, whatever, you say saturdays is a great day to get things done. Yeah, i got an idea from favorite interviewees, scientist who i was reading his notebook that is were digitized by the university of North Carolina and what you noticed his most important work always occurred on saturdays, he called saturday morning experiments so as he told me, people ask why i came in to work any other day other than saturday. [laughter] he would go and this was experimenter and he would go in to work and on saturdays he said you dont have to be completely rational, do i things that are unfunded, stay with other peoples equipment. Really, when colleagues were going to get rid of equipment, nbgbokfo, no bloody good but okay for vol oliver and it was saturday morningings where he got a key to janitors closet and invented something called jello, allowed us to separate molecules for study. [laughter] learn how to work with dna, he was training to be a doctor and he said im going to do chemistry and this was seen as him getting off track at the time and he helped pioneer biochemistry, was at the time hybrid and in 50s he becomes geneticists. He learned how to alter genes in animal to study for disease. I kept seeing the trend for creators, time set aside, unfunded, unstructured where they could do the experimentation and thats where their breakthroughs would come. I want to get back to francis because i want you to explain your relationship to her and her study and also listen to this story you just told probably not many of us in here will win the nobel prize ever but in what we do in our every day we can certainly learn from this and i think that a lot of people are now thinking about saturday not so bad after all. [laughter] but talk about francis because shes an amazing person. So the nutshell story of francis is she grew up in johnston, pennsylvania, when he was a big steel town and when her father was sickened and passing away she had to take care of the family, she got married fairly young, her husband went away to the world war ii, he was photographer, she was born in 1915, by the way, and came back and started photography and she would do whatever was needed, she was this or sort of jack all of trades person, jack of all trades master of none often times matter of one. In her 30s a prominent woman said would you like to volunteer lead girl scouts, she said i dont know anything about leadership, okay, we would have to disband the girls and frankies says, fine, six weeks and you can find a real leader and turns out she enjoys it and stays with them for 7 years until they graduate high school and short story is she keeps getting jobs with the girl scouts and she kept saying no, if you dont, we will have to get rid of this program and so she keeps saying fine for like a month and acts are Getting Better and chair the United Way Campaign for girl scouts and she never wants jobs, feel frees to do whatever she wants, i will get union to be supporters of this and united ways are like, whoa, whoa, it was big supporter, you told me to run it so im going to do my way and he does it in has biggest per capita in country. The second woman to lead it was last year, she was doing it like decades ago. And so keeps happening, taking on bigger jobs, swhen she gets in her 50s asked to be executive director of local council, thats a professional, i would never take an actual job, of course, we will have to [laughter] she start reading management books and realizes the work is vocation, in mid50s start career, keeps going well, eventually asked to new york to interview for job as ceo at the time when girl scouts is in crisis, memberships are falling off the cliff, not very cliff, no, dont want that job. And so she gets there and they say what would you do, the press girl scouts little has been captain, started coast guard reserve, leadership in industry and education, francis was one of local leaders and one semester of college education, she said i would get rid of the sacred handbook and do four that appeals to different age communities and other communities when they look at us they see themselves. And so she says get rid of camp, she goes home that was kind of fun [laughter] she arrives in new york right after as new ceo of girl scouts which she perceived to stay, 130 volunteers, enormous diversity, shes told when she gets there, fix the finances and then worry about diversity. She said, no, the diversity is the problem. Beautiful messages like one targeted native girl, your names are on the rivers and left beautiful messages and so she saves girl scouts potentially, tries to retire and the next day it is called mutual of america, come to your office on madison avenue, what are you talking about, weve noticed that youve never made longterm plan in your life. We will give you office and you will learn what to do with it. She goes to work 5 days a week at the age of 103 and a half and so this is in a chapter about the importance of shortterm planning and how [laughter] theres a lot of research, longterm plans are actually really counterproductive. She became a role model, more of than a role model, one was leadership is not a matter its a matter how to be and not what to do, the other is you have to carry a big basket to carry something home which meant she would go to trainings and people would say im not getting anything from this, if youre open minded you will get something from anything, i was stuck with my own writing and i decided to take beginners online fiction writing course, beginning writing class and didnt help in the way i thought. There was an exercise where i had to write a story with no dialogue and i realized i was leaning on dialogue in a lazy way, i went back to the whole manuscript, tons of quotes, narrative writing and that really came out of her saying, you do anything and if you bring open mind to it, you will. Im now convinced no amount of beginning courses to take and not learn something from. And i went over the hotel and realized it was like conference, i sat in beginners writing class, im probably not going to write any japanese comics but never say never. I definitely wouldnt. Believe me. [laughter] but structure, its dialogue, conflict and so she really made big impression on me in a lot of ways, i was honored to include her in the book in a big way. When i read her name in the book i went out and found her book about leadership, the difference, i think, you inspired by her and i think youve taken a whole new a whole new way, meaning, when you read her book which is amazing, its really a how to we do this, this and this and then if this happens we do this. But it doesnt tell stories and i keep thinking, i keep going back to the fact that the way you tell a story makes it you can remember it. I dont think its just a matter of advancing age but i cant remember everything that she says and i find myself point 1, point 2, point 3. But the sinthesis of it all and i think she would love your book . I think she does, in my previous book i read a lot of Memory Research and i tried to leverage that that will help people, and i tried to the to thats proactively. What i read the story, i would love for you to talk about, i thought you should write about history and then people would read it. [laughter] thats interesting that you mentioned that one of the big thicks of the book was get to go build really changed my experience of concert and museum, the del coro, music is one of the areas that we associate with early civilization so i knew i had to take it on in the book, it was in invented 17 or 18th century. Problem with baby girls dropped in the canals when sex workers couldnt take care of them essentially and so then it started the very Progressive SocialService Institutions called hospedali where there was,