Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

By the end of the class, I had a new tool in my conceptual Swiss Army knife, a way of using what little I did know to make a guess at what I didn’t. I knew the population of New York City; most single people in studio apartments probably don’t have pianos that get tuned, and most of my friends’ parents had one to three children, so how many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How long might it take to tune a piano? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work? None of the individual estimates has to be particularly accurate in order to get a reasonable overall answer.

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.