Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

“The people we study who are fulfilled do pursue a long-term goal, but they only formulate it after a period of discovery,” he told me.

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.

In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.

The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been. That feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented.

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.”

Each “story of me” continues to evolve.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday,” she said, “because I was a different person then.”

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.

“First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.”

“I know who I am when I see what I do.”

Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does. “This is a hazardous situation,” he warned, “for the young people and also for the future of science.”

The specialists were adept at working for a long time on difficult technical problems, and for anticipating development obstacles. The generalists tended to get bored working in one area for too long. They added value by integrating domains, taking technology from one area and applying it in others.

know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.

Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.

Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better,” Yale historian Paul Sabin wrote.

There is a particular kind of thinker, one who becomes more entrenched in their single big idea about how the world works even in the face of contrary facts, whose predictions become worse, not better, as they amass information for their mental representation of the world.

Experts remained undefeated while losing constantly.

Eventually, Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”

A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions. In the sweep of humanity, that is not normal.

It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to.

Those who were high in science curiosity bucked that trend. Their foxy hunt for information was like a literal fox’s hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully, and consume omnivorously. Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them.

“Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.

I would argue we don’t do a good job of saying, ‘Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?’”

“When you don’t have any data,” Feynman said, “you have to use reason.”

“Congruence” is a social science term for cultural “fit” among an institution’s components—values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles.

Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me.

The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.

“Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions.

He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn’t feel right.

He emphasized that there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure.

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

Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “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,” Lewis wrote.

He was lucky. He arrived in a workspace that treated mental meandering as a competitive advantage, not a pest to be exterminated in the name of efficiency.

New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” said sociologist Brian Uzzi, Amaral’s collaborator. Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.”

To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.

The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.

“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”

It doesn’t mean breakthrough creation is luck, although that helps, but rather that it is hard and inconsistent. Going where no one has is a wicked problem. There is no well-defined formula or perfect system of feedback to follow. It’s like the stock market that way; if you want the sky highs, you have to tolerate a lot of lows.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.