Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.

highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination.

Dunning Kueger effect,.

the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.

When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.

In one exercise, teams of eight had to get themselves and a length of telephone pole over a six-foot wall without letting the pole touch the ground, and without any of the soldiers or the pole touching the wall.* The difference in individuals’ performances were so stark, with clear leaders, followers, braggarts, and wimps naturally emerging under the stress of the task, that Kahneman and his fellow evaluators grew confident they could analyze the candidates’ leadership qualities and identify how they would perform in officer training and in combat. They were completely mistaken. Every few months, they had a “statistics day” where they got feedback on how accurate their predictions had been. Every time, they learned they had done barely better than blind guessing. Every time, they gained experience and gave confident judgments. And every time, they did not improve. Kahneman marveled at the “complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight.”

it showed 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.

“kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.”

His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers.

“There are so many layers of thinking,” he said. “We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive. That seems to be what the trick is.”

His suggestions for avoiding it are about the polar opposite of the strict version of the ten-thousand-hours school of thought: vary challenges within a domain drastically, and, as a fellow researcher put it, insist on “having one foot outside your world.”

Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer.

The most successful experts also belong to the wider world.

Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.

Isn't this ultimately what a capability driven model does?

Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.

utilitarian spectacles have been swapped for spectacles through which the world is classified by concepts.*

Where the very thoughts of premodern villagers were circumscribed by their direct experiences, modern minds are comparatively free. This is not to say that one way of life is uniformly better than another.

a city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.

Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”*

“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.” He does not mean this in the simple sense that every computer science major needs an art history class, but rather that everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.

Flynn introduced broad concepts in class, but he is sure that he often buried them in a mountain of other information specific to that class alone—a bad habit he worked to overcome.

How do I ensure that the broad concepts I am trying to convey don’t get swallowed up in the minutia? Especially when some of the team I support and the customers have such a narrow focus?.

They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.

Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major—a trend that includes math and science majors—after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline.

And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

What are the inherent risks of narrow thinking in our business?,

the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.

“I especially love analogies,” he wrote, “my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the secrets of nature. . . . One should make great use of them.”

“In my opinion,” Gentner told me, “our ability to think relationally is one of the reasons we’re running the planet. Relations are really hard for other species.” Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts.

A gift of a single analogy from a different domain tripled the proportion of solvers who got the radiation problem. Two analogies from disparate domains gave an even bigger boost.

relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.

If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario—physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician—the more likely you are to say that the scenario you are investigating will occur.

When interviewing the more you know the more you think you can predict the success of a candidate. This would suggest that the opposite is true;

Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.

What seemed like the single best analogy did not do well on its own.

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

being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative.

Unfortunately, students also said that if they were to use analogy companies at all, they believed the best way to generate strategic options would be to focus on a single example in the same field.

“Think of the Integrated Science Program as a biology minor, chemistry minor, physics minor, and math minor combined into a single major. The primary intent of this program is to expose students to all fields of the natural and mathematical sciences so that they can see commonalities among different fields of the natural sciences. . . . The ISP major allows you to see connections across different disciplines.”

Similar to industrial engineering

“When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual,”

“Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities.

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.

“admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.”

Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

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

knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.

Diversity was great, Hesselbein was told, but it was too much too soon. Fix the organizational problems, and then worry about diversity. But she had decided that diversity was the primary organizational problem, so she took it further.

“Oh, don’t ask me what my training was,” she replied with a dismissing hand wave. 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.

some “undefinable process of digestion” occurred as diverse experiences accumulated. “I was unaware that I was being prepared,” she told me. “I did not intend to become a leader, I just learned by doing what was needed at the time.”