Range Quotes

“In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, 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. Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts. It also allows us to understand that which we cannot see at all.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Each time he got stuck, Kepler unleashed a fusillade of analogies. Not just light, heat, odor, currents and boatmen, but optics of lenses, balance scales, a broom, magnets, a magnetic broom, orators gazing at a crowd, and more. He interrogated each one ruthlessly, every time alighting on new questions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while deep learning is not. “When your intuition says block,” Kornell told me, “you should probably interleave.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run. If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, so that the test will be more difficult when you do.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Used for learning, testing, including self-testing, is a very desirable difficulty. Even testing prior to studying works, at the point when wrong answers are assured.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Training without hints is slow and error-ridden. It is, essentially, what we normally think of as testing, except for the purpose of learning rather than evaluation—when “test” becomes a dreaded four-letter word.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The overall experiment results went like this: the more hints that were available during training, the better the monkeys performed during early practice, and the worse they performed on test day.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Students were given some of the words and definitions together. For example, To discuss something in order to come to an agreement: Negotiate. For others, they were shown only the definition and given a little time to think of the right word, even if they had no clue, before it was revealed. When they were tested later, students did way better on the definition-first words. The experiment was repeated on students at Columbia University, with more obscure words (Characterized by haughty scorn: Supercilious). The results were the same.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term. Excessive hint-giving, like in the eighth-grade math classroom, does the opposite; it bolsters immediate performance, but undermines progress in the long run.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In totality, the picture is in line with a classic research finding that is not specific to music: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, 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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The strict deliberate practice school describes useful training as focused consciously on error correction. But the most comprehensive examination of development in improvisational forms, by Duke University professor Paul Berliner, described the childhoods of professionals as “one of osmosis,” not formal instruction. “Most explored the band room’s diverse options as a prelude to selecting an instrument of specialization,” he wrote. “It was not uncommon for youngsters to develop skills on a variety of instruments.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the distribution of effort across different instruments seems important. Those children identified as exceptional by [the school] turn out to be those children who distributed their effort more evenly across three instruments.” The less skilled students tended to spend their time on the first instrument they picked up, as if they could not give up a perceived head start. The exceptional students developed more like the figlie del coro. “The modest investment in a third instrument paid off handsomely for the exceptional children,” the scientists concluded.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In the genre of modern self-help narratives, music training has stood beside golf atop the podium, exemplars of the power of a narrowly focused head start in highly technical training. Whether it is the story of Tiger Woods or the Yale law professor known as the Tiger Mother, the message is the same: choose early, focus narrowly, never waver.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Flynn’s great disappointment is the degree to which society, and particularly higher education, has responded to the broadening of the mind by pushing specialization, rather than focusing early training on conceptual, transferable knowledge.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“exposure to modern work with self-directed problem solving and nonrepetitive challenges was correlated with being “cognitively flexible.” As Flynn makes sure to point out, this does not mean that brains now have more inherent potential than a generation ago, but rather that utilitarian spectacles have been swapped for spectacles through which the world is classified by concepts.*”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Conceptual schemes are flexible, able to arrange information and ideas for a wide variety of uses, and to transfer knowledge between domains. Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“we now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” He means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so,” Flynn concluded.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“As psychologist Ellen Winner, one of the foremost authorities on gifted children, noted, no savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Chunking can seem like magic, but it comes from extensive, repetitive practice.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“repeated the De Groot exercise, but added a wrinkle. This time, the chess players were also given boards with the pieces in an arrangement that would never actually occur in a game. Suddenly, the experts performed just like the lesser players. The grandmasters never had photographic memories after all. Through repetitive study of game patterns, they had learned to do what Chase and Simon called “chunking.” Rather than struggling to remember the location of every individual pawn, bishop, and rook, the brains of elite players grouped pieces into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on familiar patterns.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World