Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

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.”

In reality, the Roger path to sports stardom is far more prevalent than the Tiger path, but those athletes’ stories are much more quietly told, if they are told at all.

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.

it takes time—and often forgoing a head start—to develop personal and professional range, but it is worth it.

learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress.

a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old.

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

“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

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.

experts in an array of fields are remarkably similar to chess masters in that they instinctively recognize familiar patterns.

experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.

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

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

The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “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.

the more a task shifts to an open world of big-picture strategy, the more humans have to add.

the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution.

In a truly open-world problem devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous.

“How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.

Erik Dane, a Rice University professor who studies organizational behavior, calls this phenomenon “cognitive entrenchment.”

scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation.

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

“To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”

than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests.

The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has now been documented in more than thirty countries.

The more they had moved toward modernity, the more powerful their abstract thinking, and the less they had to rely on their concrete experience of the world as a reference point.

Econ majors did the best overall. Economics is a broad field by nature, and econ professors have been shown to apply the reasoning principles they’ve learned to problems outside their area.

Almost none of the students in any major showed a consistent understanding of how to apply methods of evaluating truth they had learned in their own discipline to other areas.

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

college departments rush to develop students in a narrow specialty area, while failing to sharpen the tools of thinking that can serve them in every area.

One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world.

“Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.”

detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.

Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday.

They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience.

He had learned to learn, and his multi-instrument and poly-genre skill became so renowned that it got him into a tricky spot.

Duke University professor Paul Berliner, described the childhoods of professionals as “one of osmosis,” not formal instruction.

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

breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models,

Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.

creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart.

I think when you’re self-taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn how to solve problems.”

Learning, Fast and Slow

“We’re very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to in order to accomplish a task,”

“desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.

Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.*

The study conclusion was simple: “training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.” Training without hints is slow and error-ridden.

Even testing prior to studying works, at the point when wrong answers are assured.

Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning.