Cultivating Curiosity and Range with NY Times Best Selling Author David Epstein

David Epstein joins us on this week’s episode of the podcast. He is the author of 2 books: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, a #1 NY Times best seller, and The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athlete Performance, another NY Times best seller. He was previously a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica, and prior to that, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He has done amazing work, and has a TedTalk that has been viewed over 8.5 million times.

In this episode, we discuss where his curiosity comes from (5:40), his brother (11:40), why he combined his sports and science interest (13:00), how pain predicates behavioral change (14:30), the power of feeling all emotions (17:40), how he thinks about his audience (19:30), how he got over the fear of putting his book out (23:40), if he ever gets imposter syndrome (27:30), preparation vs. performance mindset (29:40), what he does to prepare for speaking (32:40), how he thinks about grit and agility (36:30), the importance of curiosity (44:30), what has allowed him to have conversations with Gladwell and Duckworth (47:00), the value in drilling and playing (53:30), nature vs. nurture in his books (57:10), how we nurture the nature (1:01:20), and what he learned from the Girls Scout CEO (1:04:30).

Thank you to David for coming on the podcast. We encourage you to check out his newsletter which you can find at https://davidepstein.com/, and also follow him on Twitter @DavidEpstein.

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that will be coming out in October 2020, and you can pre-order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening,

-Brian