Range Quotes

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better,” Yale historian Paul Sabin wrote. “The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon.” As each man amassed more information for his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“He emphasized that there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“At one point they morphed into standardized forms that had to be filled out. Monday Notes became one more rigid formality in a process culture. “Immediately, the quality of the notes fell,” wrote another official NASA historian.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind. Two Roman historians recorded that when Julius Caesar was a young man he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain and broke down in tears. “Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable,” he supposedly said. Pretty soon, that concern was a distant memory and Caesar was in charge of the Roman Republic—which he turned into a dictatorship before he was murdered by his own pals. It’s fair to say that like most youth athletes with highlight reels, he peaked early. 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. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“vice versa. Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Some people argue that part of the reason U.S. students don’t do as well on international measures of high school knowledge is that they’re doing too well in class,” Nate Kornell, a cognitive psychologist at Williams College, told me. “What you want is to make it easy to make it hard.” Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“other UK infrastructure projects began implementing outside-view approaches, essentially forcing managers to make analogies to many outside projects of the past.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common, and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational-poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“companies do their most impactful creative work in a crisis, because the disciplinary boundaries fly out the window. “Communication really happens in the carpool,” he once said. He made sure that “dabble time” was a cultural staple.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When you push the boundaries, a lot of it is just probing. It has to be inefficient,” Casadevall told me. “What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 2016, Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi closed his Nobel lecture ominously: “Truly original discoveries in science are often triggered by unpredictable and unforeseen small findings. . . . Scientists are increasingly required to provide evidence of immediate and tangible applications of their work.” That is head start fervor come full circle; explorers have to pursue such narrowly specialized goals with such hyperefficiency that they can say what they will find before they look for it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement,” the economists wrote, “on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Struggling to hold on to information and then recall it had helped the group distracted by math problems transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Uzzi and a team analyzed eighteen million papers from a variety of scientific domains to see whether atypical knowledge combinations mattered. If a particular paper cited other areas of research that rarely, if ever, appeared together, then it was classified as having used an atypical combination of knowledge.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“If you write an interdisciplinary grant proposal, it goes to people who are really, really specialized in A or B, and maybe if you’re lucky they have the capacity to see the connections at the interface of A and B,” he told me. “Everyone acknowledges that great progress is made at the interface, but who is there to defend the interface?”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“You can do your entire career on one cell type and it’s more likely you keep your job by getting grants,” Casadevall told me. “There is not even pressure to integrate. In fact, if you write a grant proposal about how the B cell is integrating with the macrophage [a basic interaction of the immune system],* there may be no one to review it. If it goes to the macrophage people, they say, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about it. Why B cells?’ The system maintains you in a trench. You basically have all these parallel trenches, and it’s very rare that anybody stands up and actually looks at the next trench to see what they are doing, and often it’s related.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“As NASA engineer Mary Shafer once articulated, “Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.” It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on what Weick called overlearned behavior. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool. Research on aviation accidents, for example, found that “a common pattern was the crew’s decision to continue with their original plan” even when conditions changed dramatically.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Weick saw that experienced groups became rigid under pressure and “regress to what they know best.” They behaved like a collective hedgehog, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone, as if trying to will it to become something they actually had experienced before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.” For him, firefighters were an example, and a metaphor for what he learned while studying normally reliable organizations that clung to trusty methods, even when they led to bewildering decisions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World