Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors. —Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History

Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

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.

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing “the gray average mass,” as Laszlo put it.

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 those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

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.

Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy.

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 on...

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range.

The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.

everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.

Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning.

The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.*

Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.

“Professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement,” the economists wrote, “on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.” What looked like a head start evaporated.

“Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”

As with all desirable difficulties, the trouble is that a head start comes fast, but deep learning is slow. “The slowest growth,” the researchers wrote, occurs “for the most complex skills.”

Knowledge with enduring utility must be very flexible, composed of mental schemes that can be matched to new problems.

problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.” As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”

“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.

we learn who we are only by living, and not before.

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.”

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.”

A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”

“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.

She is a “T-shaped person,” she said, one who has breadth, compared to an “I-shaped person,” who only goes deep,

“T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,” she told me. “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 this other knowledge inherently. It’s mosaic building. I just keep putting those tiles together. Imagine me in a network where I didn’t have the ability to access all these people. That really wouldn’t work well.”

Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.”

Starting with the details—the inside view—is dangerous. Hedgehog experts have more than enough knowledge about the minutiae of an issue in their specialty to do just what Dan Kahan suggested: cherry-pick details that fit their all-encompassing theories.

“Good judges are good belief updaters,”

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.

“It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

“A jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Diversifying the entry points into a given path, I think, is a productive strategy. That includes allowing for early specialization, when it makes sense, as one of many possibilities.