When they actually track/ athletes over the course of their development/ the pattern looks like this, / the future elites actually spend less time / early on / in deliberate practice / in their eventual sport.// They tend to have what scientists call / "a sampling period," / where they try a variety of physical activities.// They gain broad general skills.// They learn about their interests / and abilities / and delay specializing / until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.// And so / when I saw that / I said / "Gosh / that doesn't really comport with the 10,000-hour rule, / does it?. // So I started to wonder about other domains / that we associate with obligatory early specialization/ like music//. Turns out the patterns often similar.// This is research from a world-class music academy/ and I want to draw your attention to /is this /the exceptional musicians didn't start spending more time in deliberate practice /than the average musicians until their third /instrument //. They too/ tended to have a sampling period.// Even musicians we think of as famously precocious/ like Yo-Yo Ma.// He had a sampling period//. He just went through it more rapidly than most musicians do.// Nonetheless,/ this research is almost entirely ignored/ and much more impactful/ is the first page of the book Battle Hymn of the tiger mother/ where the author recounts assigning her daughter violin/, nobody seems to remember the part later in the book/ where her daughter turns to her and says/ "You picked it, not me."/ and largely quits.// So, having seen this sort of surprising pattern/ in sports and music/ I started to wonder about domains that affect even more people like education.// An economist found a natural experiment / in the higher ED systems of England/ and Scotland.// In the period he studied the systems were very similar / except in England/ students had to specialize/ in their mid-teen years to pick a specific course of study to apply to//. Or in Scotland,/ they could keep trying things in university/ if they wanted to.// And his question was,/ "Who wins the trade-off;/ the early/ or the late specializers?'"//And what he saw was that the early specializers/ jump out to an income lead/ because they have more domain-specific skills.// The late specializers get to try more different things /and when they do pick ,/they have better fit/ or what economists call / "match quality"/ and so/ their growth rates are faster.// By six years out,/ they erased that income gap.// Meanwhile/ the early specializers/ start quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers/ essentially because they were made to choose so early/ that they more often made poor choices.// So the late specializers losing the short term/ and win in the long run. //