Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

research that rocked psychology because 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.

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

“the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”

even the science majors were typically unable to generalize research methods from their own field to other fields.

Fortunately, as an undergrad, I did have a chemistry professor who embodied Flynn’s ideal. On every exam, amid typical chemistry questions, was something like this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” Students had to estimate, just by reasoning, and try to get the right order of magnitude. The professor later explained that these were “Fermi problems,” because Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems.* The ultimate lesson of the question was that detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.

Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later.

“You ask, ‘Can you read music?’ And the guy says, ‘Not enough to hurt my playing.’”

The trouble with using no more than a single analogy, particularly one from a very similar situation, is that it does not help battle the natural impulse to employ the “inside view,” a term coined by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. We take the inside view when we make judgments based narrowly on the details of a particular project that are right in front of us. Kahneman had a personal experience with the dangers of the inside view when he assembled a team to write a high school curriculum on the science of decision making. After a full year of weekly meetings, he surveyed the entire team to find out how long everyone thought the project would take. The lowest estimate was one and a half years, the highest two and a half years. Kahneman then asked a team member named Seymour, a distinguished curriculum expert who had seen the process with other teams, how this one compared. Seymour thought for a while. Moments earlier, he had estimated it would take about two more years. Faced with Kahneman’s question about other teams, he said he had never even thought to compare this instance to separate projects, but that about 40 percent of the teams he’d seen never finished at all, and not a single one he could think of took less than seven years. Kahneman’s group was not willing to spend six more years on a curriculum project that might fail. They spent a few minutes debating the new opinion, and decided to forge ahead trusting the about-two-years wisdom of the group. ...

For a unique 2012 experiment, University of Sydney business strategy professor Dan Lovallo—who had conducted inside-view research with Kahneman—and a pair of economists theorized that starting out by making loads of diverse analogies, Kepler style, would naturally lead to the outside view and improve decisions. They recruited investors from large private equity firms who consider a huge number of potential projects in a variety of domains. The researchers thought the investors’ work might naturally lend itself to the outside view. The private equity investors were told to assess a real project they were currently working on with a detailed description of the steps to success, and to predict the project’s return on investment. They were then asked to write down a batch of other investment projects they knew of with broad conceptual similarity to theirs—for instance, other examples of a business owner looking to sell, or a start-up with a technologically risky product. They were instructed to estimate the return for each of those examples too. In the end, the investors estimated that the return on their own project would be about 50 percent higher than the outside projects they had identified as conceptually similar. When given the chance at the end to rethink and revise, they slashed their own initial estimate. “They were sort of shocked,” Lovallo told me, “and the senior people were the most shocked.” The investors initially judged their own projects, where they knew all t...

an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: 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.

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

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

Fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss began studying chemical engineering in college, which “led to a revelation that chemical engineering is boring.” He then spent nine years bouncing between majors “before being kindly asked to graduate already.” After that, according to his official bio, “Patrick went to grad school. He’d rather not talk about it.” Meanwhile, he was slowly working on a novel. That novel, The Name of the Wind (in which chemistry appears repeatedly), sold millions of copies worldwide and is source material for a potential TV successor to Game of Thrones.

Danish proverb that warns “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,”

Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science. Kahan thinks it could be because they are better at finding evidence to confirm their feelings: the more time they spend on the topic, the more hedgehog-like they become.

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.

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

“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves—their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”

“My recommendation for those of you who want to become executives is to work across as many job functions as possible.”

“Research has established pretty firmly that diverse groups of people are better at innovation and problem solving, but more recent research is finding that diverse career histories within a single person can also benefit performance.”

Don’t confuse the healthy development of a work ethic with the premature commitment to a singular passion.”

people who got narrow, career-focused education were more likely to be employed right out of school and earned more right away, but over time both advantages evaporated;

early specializers often won in the short term, and lost in the long run. Workers who received general education, the economists concluded, were better positioned to adapt to change in a wicked world, where work next year might not look like work last year.