Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

They may then evaluate it, if they have time, but often stick with it. This time will probably be like the last time, so extensive narrow experience works.

Generating new ideas or facing novel problems with high uncertainty is nothing like that. Evaluating an array of options before letting intuitio...

foster analogical thinking and conceptual connections that can help students categorize the type of problem they are facing. That is precisely a skill that sets the most adept problem solvers apart.

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.

problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.”

“a problem well put is half-solved.”

“What matters to me,”

Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new—and analogies served as the wilderness guide.

“When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual,”

which impart a broad mixture of strategies, is that they may require abandoning a head start toward a major or career. That is a tough sell, even if it better serves learners in the long run.

making-connections knowledge

broad co...

the distant, deep structural analogi...

there is often no entrenched interest fighting on the side of range, or of knowledge that must be slowly acquired. All forces align to incentivize a head start and early, narrow specialization, even if that is a poor long-term strategy. That is a problem, because another kind of knowledge, perhaps the most important of all, is necessarily slowly...

Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.

“Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities.

“The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.”

One is essentially work ethic and resilience, and the other is “consistency of interests”—direction, knowing exactly what one wants.

with more knowledge of their skills and preferences, choosing to pursue a different goal was no longer the gritless route; it was the smart one.

Growing self-knowledge kept changing my goals and interests

“Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports,”

striving to accomplish a single overarching goal every day means you have grit, determination and resilience. But the ability to pull yourself together mentally and physically in competition is different from the new challenges that await you.

So after you retire, travel, write a poem, try to start your own business, stay out a little too late, devote time to something ...

finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake o...

quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.

how the sunk cost mindset is so deeply entrenched that conmen know to begin by asking their marks for several small favors or investments before progressing to large asks.

Once a mark has invested energy or money, rather than walking away from sunk costs he will continue investing, more than he ever wanted to, even as, to any rational observer, disaster becomes imminent.

“I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest”

the idea that a change of interest, or a recalibration of focus, is an imperfection and competitive disadvantage leads to a simple, one-size-fits-all Tiger story: pick and stick, as soon as possible. Responding to lived experience with a change of direction, like Van Gogh did habitually, like West Point graduates have been doing since the dawn of the knowledge economy, is less tidy but no less important. It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning.

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.

Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts.

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

we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives.

“All of the strengths-finder stuff, it gives people license to pigeonhole themselves or others in ways that just don’t take into account how much we grow and evolve and blossom and discover new things,”

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.”

It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. . . . Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. . . . In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans. And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don’t give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. . . .

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

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

the most clever solution always came from a piece of knowledge that was not a part of the normal

“outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.

If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry,” Pegau said. “I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.”

Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.

InnoCentive works in part because, as specialists become more narrowly focused, “the box” is more like Russian nesting dolls. Specialists divide into subspecialties, which soon divide into sub-subspecialties. Even if they get outside the small doll, they may get stuck inside the next, slightly larger one.

They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before.

If those fail, they’re stuck. For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a domain-based solution is often inferior,”

“Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.” Since InnoCentive demonstrated the concept, other organizations have arisen to capit...

It’s very hard to win a competition just by using [well-known] methods,”

“We need more creative solutions.”

“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”