Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

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. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.

In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly.

The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing.

In a study during the run-up to the Brexit vote, a small majority of both Remainers and Brexiters were able to correctly interpret made-up statistics about the efficacy of a rash-curing skin cream, but when voters were given the same exact data presented as if it indicated that immigration either increased or decreased crime, hordes of Brits suddenly became innumerate and misinterpreted statistics that disagreed with their political beliefs. Kahan found the same phenomenon in the United States using skin cream and gun control.

Another aspect of the forecaster training involved ferociously dissecting prediction results in search of lessons, especially for predictions that turned out bad.

An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme in research on creative thinkers.

So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you.

“Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful.”