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, from college administrators assessing student potential to psychiatrists predicting patient performance to human resources professionals deciding who will succeed in job training. In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.

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

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.

He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds.

premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest.

As Flynn makes sure to point out, this does not mean that brains now have more inherent potential than a generation ago, but rather that utilitarian spectacles have been swapped for spectacles through which the world is classified by concepts.

“Even the best universities aren’t developing critical intelligence,” he told me. “They aren’t giving students the tools to analyze the modern world, except in their area of specialization. Their education is too narrow.”

This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.

Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic.

A gift of a single analogy from a different domain tripled the proportion of solvers who got the radiation problem.

successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context. For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.”

If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.

The expression “young and foolish,” he wrote, describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value.

Godin argued that “winners”—he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it.

The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.

She explained that she just did whatever seemed like it would teach her something and allow her to be of service at each moment, and somehow that added up to training.

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.”

Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘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.’”

Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat.

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

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

Virtually every good thing in my life I can trace back to a misfortune, so my feeling is you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad when things happen. You do not know. You have to wait to find out.”

“My passion for the sport hasn’t waned,” she said when she retired, “but my passion for new experiences and new challenges is what is now burning the most brightly.”

“To be frank, I don’t think we can benefit from domain expertise too much. . . . It’s very hard to win a competition just by using [ well-known] methods,” he replied. “We need more creative solutions.”

“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”

if this big bang of public knowledge continued apace, subspecialties would be like galaxies, flying away from one another until each is invisible to every other.

Sometimes, the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.