Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

“The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.” Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

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

For professionals who did switch, whether they specialized early or late, switching was a good idea. “You lose a good fraction of your skills, so there’s a hit,” Malamud said, “but you do actually have higher growth rates after switching.”

Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.

two components of grit. One is essentially work ethic and resilience, and the other is “consistency of interests”—direction, knowing exactly what one wants.

“multi-armed bandit process.” “One-armed bandit” is slang for a slot machine. A multi-armed bandit process refers to a hypothetical scenario: a single gambler is sitting in front of an entire row of slot machines; each machine has its own unique

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

“We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”

realized that I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them.

In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.

decided then that a community that valued inclusiveness should answer “yes” to the question, “When they look at us, can they find themselves?”

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.

Each dark horse had a novel journey, but a common strategy. “Short-term planning,” Ogas told me. “They all practice it, not long-term planning.”

Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.

Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to experience. In middle age, adults grow more consistent and cautious and less curious, open-minded, and

The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist.

Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are.

“If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.”

When she compiled her findings, the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.

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

And repeat. If that sounds facile, consider that it is precisely the opposite of a vast marketing crusade that assures customers they can alight on thei...

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.

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.”

Paradise Garden, ninety miles northwest of Atlanta, the painting-

Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.

For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a domain-based solution is often inferior,” according to Lakhani. “Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.” Since InnoCentive demonstrated the concept, other

“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

Swanson became concerned about increasing specialization, that it would lead to publications that catered only to a very small group of specialists and inhibit creativity. “The disparity between the total quantity of recorded knowledge . . . and the limited human capacity to assimilate it, is not only enormous now but grows unremittingly,” he once said. How can frontiers be pushed, Swanson wondered, if one day it will take a lifetime just to reach them in each specialized domain? In 1960, the U.S. National Library of Medicine used about one hundred unique pairs of terms to index articles. By 2010, it was nearing one hundred thousand. Swanson felt that 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. Given that he knew interdisciplinary problem solving was important, that was a conundrum.

Academic departments no longer merely fracture naturally into subspecialties, they elevate narrowness as an ideal.

a key to creative problem solving is tapping outsiders who use different approaches “so that the ‘home field’ for the problem does not end up constraining the solution.”

“lateral thinking with withered technology.” Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses. By “withered technology,” Yokoi meant tech that was old enough to be extremely well understood

liquid crystal display element touched a plate in the screen, which created a visual distortion of light and dark bands, known as Newton’s rings.

From a technological standpoint, even in 1989, the Game Boy was laughable. Yokoi’s team cut every corner. The Game Boy’s processor had been cutting edge—in the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, home consoles were in fierce competition over graphics quality. The Game Boy was an eyesore.

To top it off, the Game Boy had to compete with handheld consoles from Sega and Atari that were technologically superior in every way. And it destroyed them. What its withered technology lacked, the Game Boy made up in user experience. It was cheap. It could fit in a large pocket. It was all but indestructible. If a drop cracked the screen—and it had to be a horrific drop—it kept on ticking. If it were left in a backpack that went in the washing machine, once it dried out it was ready to roll a few days later. Unlike its power-guzzling color competitors, it played for days (or weeks) on AA batteries. Old hardware was extremely familiar to developers inside and outside Nintendo, and with their creativity and speed unencumbered by learning new technology, they pumped out games as if they were early ancestors of iPhone app designers—Tetris, Super Mario Land, The Final Fantasy Legend, and a slew of sports games released in the first year were all smash hits. With simple technology, Yokoi’s team sidestepped the hardware arms race and drew the game programming community onto its team.

The Game Boy became the Sony Walkman of video gaming, forgoing top-of-the-line tech for portability and affordability.

“It was difficult to get Nintendo to understand,” he said later. Yokoi was convinced, though, that if users were drawn into the games, technological power would be an afterthought. “If you draw two circles on a blackboard, and say, ‘That’s a snowman,’ everyone who sees it will sense the white color of the snow,” he argued.

(In 2015, Ad Age awarded “Pro Bono Campaign of the Year” to the cheeky lateral thinkers of the “Drop-A-Brick” project, which manufactured rubber bricks for use in California toilets during a drought.)

functional fixedness.

Nintendo “simply innovated in a different way,”

“It understood that the barrier to new consumers using video game systems was the complexity of game play, not the quality of existing graphics.”

his concern was that as companies grew and technology progressed, vertical-thinking hyperspecialists would continue to be valued but lateral-thinking generalists would not.

“If they say, ‘It’s a great idea, go for it, makes sense,’ what is the chance you’re the first person to come up with it? Precisely zero,” he told me.

The iridescent blue morpho butterfly has no blue pigment whatsoever; its wings glow azure and

“polymaths,” broad with at least one area of depth.

“My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all

“If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”

all. If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate? The answer (in addition to not being overworked) was how many of twenty-two different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi. Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did.

Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.

Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams—they were less likely to produce a smash hit—but as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams: an individual creator who had worked in four or more genr...