Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

experience simply did not create skill in a wide range of real-world scenarios,

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

“cognitive entrenchment.”

stuck in your ways

The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.

“that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.”

brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating.

“The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”

Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.

“produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.”

Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning.

Learning deeply means learning slowly.

deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project,

the more distant the analogy, the better it was for idea generation.

“variety of base domains,” which foster analogical thinking and conceptual connections that can help students categorize the type of problem they are facing.

successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.

labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains.

those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.

Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

match quality optimization,

‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.’”

we learn who we are only by living,

We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”

Ein-stellung effect,

a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.

putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered.

comprehensive theory of creativity. But there is a well-documented tendency people have to consider only familiar uses for objects, an instinct known as functional fixedness.

we need both focused frogs and visionary birds.

high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance.

“individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.”

lateral-thinking integrator.

core trait of the best forecasters to me as: “genuinely curious about, well, really everything.”

thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts;

think laterally, broaden their experience, and forge their own path in search of match quality.

“A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,”