Range Quotes

“In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“She then proceeded to respond like a great coach developing an athlete; she let me engage in broad, self-directed activity, and when I resurfaced two years later with a manuscript that was too long, she switched gears and responded to my desire for fast and frequent feedback as I cut it down to size and shape. When the time came, she gave feedback that made a wicked learning environment a bit more kind (“Yes, I like it; now he sounds like less of a magical gnome.” —Courtney’s feedback on what may have been an overwritten description.). Appropriately, she has range; she almost became an engineer.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“All sorts of cool things transpired while I worked on this book. For example: I learned a ton. Also, one day while my brain was overheating, a cardinal, a blue jay, and an oriole appeared near my windowsill—that’s all the eponymous birds of Major League Baseball teams. That never happens.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“On the other hand, you have people like me, who aren’t quite sure what they’re going to be when they grow up, only—as the twelve-year-old recommended—a list of things they’d like to learn about this year. I recently came across a quote from Christopher Nolan—writer and director of films like Inception, Interstellar, and The Dark Knight—on finding a next project. “For me, it’s all about trying new things,” he said. “If you’re going to write, you want to read a lot before you write, without any purpose.” Of course, the purpose is to find something that stimulates you but that you couldn’t have known to look for—an interest you didn’t know you had. I think I’ll take that advice.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In late 2019, I had a chance to talk with Serena Williams. I hadn’t researched her childhood at all, but I had heard that it was a Tiger story. I was only slightly surprised when she complicated that notion. Her father was ahead of his time, she told me. She participated in ballet, gymnastics, taekwondo, and track and field. She and Venus threw a football to develop the motion for a powerful serve, a habit they continued as professionals.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Shortly after Range came out, Ruth Brennan Morrey—a former college soccer co-captain and pro triathlete, Olympic Trials marathon qualifier, and psychology PhD—tagged me in an apt tweet: “Listening to @DavidEpstein ‘Range’ in the car with 12 year old daughter. ‘Mom, why do we make “What I want to be when I grow up” signs on the first day of school? We should make “Top 5 things I want to learn about this year” signs.’ Smart cookie. :-)” I think I’ll borrow the twelve-year-old’s idea.”
― 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.”
― 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.” When engineer Bill Gore left DuPont to form the company that invented Gore-Tex, he fashioned it after his observation that 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

“New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” said sociologist Brian Uzzi, Amaral’s collaborator. Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.” Uzzi documented an import/export trend that began in both the physical and social sciences in the 1970s, pre-internet: more successful teams tended to have more far-flung members. Teams that included members from different institutions were more likely to be successful than those that did not, and teams that included members based in different countries had an advantage as well.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, is insufficient to grapple with humanity’s greatest challenges. We have long known the laws of thermodynamics, but struggle to predict the spread of a forest fire. We know how cells work, but can’t predict the poetry that will be written by a human made up of them. The frog’s-eye view of individual parts is not enough. A healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity. Even now, even in endeavors that engender specialization unprecedented in history, there are beacons of breadth. Individuals who live by historian Arnold Toynbee’s words that “no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.” Rather than wielding a single tool, they have managed to collect and protect an entire toolshed, and they show the power of range in a hyperspecialized world.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The researcher who led that work went on to study thousands of businesses. She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable. Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“They were productively adversarial, like superforecasting team discussions. Managers grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions. The process had worked remarkably. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, and all twenty-four flights had returned safely. But on the emergency conference call, that same quantitative culture led them astray. On their engineers’ advice, McDonald and two Thiokol VPs on the call initially supported a no-launch decision. The Challenger had already been cleared, so this was an eleventh-hour reversal. When NASA officials asked Thiokol engineers exactly what temperature range was safe for flight, they recommended setting a limit at 53 degrees, the lower bound of previous experience. NASA manager Larry Mulloy was flabbergasted. He thought the shuttle was supposed to be cleared to launch from 31 to 99 degrees. A last-minute 53-degree limit was setting an entirely new technical criteria for launches. It had never been discussed, was not backed by quantitative data, and meant that suddenly winter was off-limits for space exploration. Mulloy found it frustrating; he later called it “dumb.” How had the engineers arrived at that number? “They said because they had flown at 53 degrees before,” a NASA manager reflected, “which is no reason to me. That’s tradition rather than technology.” Boisjoly was asked again for data to support his claim, “and I said I have none other than what is being presented.” With the conference call at an impasse, a Thiokol VP asked for a five-minute “offline caucus,” during which Thiokol concluded that they had no more data to provide. They returned to the call a half hour later with a new decision: proceed with launch. Their official document read, “temperature data not conclusive on predicting primary O-ring blow-by.” When conference call participants from NASA and Thiokol later spoke with investigators and gave interviews, they repeatedly brought up the “weak engineering position,” as one put it. Their statements comprised a repetitive chorus: “Unable to quantify”; “supporting data was subjective”; “hadn’t done a good technical job”; “just didn’t have enough conclusive data.” NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“But there were plenty of examples of international negotiation failures, exits from international agreements, and forced currency conversions that allowed the best forecasters to ground themselves in what usually happens without focusing narrowly on all the unique details of the present situation. 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. Their deep knowledge works against them. Skillful forecasters depart from the problem at hand to consider completely unrelated events with structural commonalities rather than relying on intuition based on personal experience or a single area of expertise.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs: they became more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge. Those who were high in science curiosity bucked that trend. Their foxy hunt for information was like a literal fox’s hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully, and consume omnivorously. Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them. “Depth can be inadequate without breadth,” wrote Jonathan Baron, the psychologist who developed measurements of active open-mindedness.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Superforecasters’ online interactions are exercises in extremely polite antagonism, disagreeing without being disagreeable. Even on a rare occasion when someone does say, “‘You’re full of beans, that doesn’t make sense to me, explain this,’” Cousins told me, “they don’t mind that.” Agreement is not what they are after; they are after aggregating perspectives, lots of them. In an impressively unsightly image, Tetlock described the very best forecasters as foxes with dragonfly eyes. Dragonfly eyes are composed of tens of thousands of lenses, each with a different perspective, which are then synthesized in the dragonfly’s brain.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Scott Eastman told me that he “never completely fit in one world.” He grew up in Oregon and competed in math and science contests, but in college he studied English literature and fine arts. He has been a bicycle mechanic, a housepainter, founder of a housepainting company, manager of a multimillion-dollar trust, a photographer, a photography teacher, a lecturer at a Romanian university—in subjects ranging from cultural anthropology to civil rights—and, most unusually, chief adviser to the mayor of Avrig, a small town in the middle of Romania. In that role, he did everything from helping integrate new technologies into the local economy to dealing with the press and participating in negotiations with Chinese business leaders. Eastman narrates his life like a book of fables; each experience comes with a lesson. “I think that housepainting was probably one of the greatest helps,” he told me. It afforded him the chance to interact with a diverse palette of colleagues and clients, from refugees seeking asylum to Silicon Valley billionaires whom he would chat with if he had a long project working on their homes. He described it as fertile ground for collecting perspectives. But housepainting is probably not a singular education for geopolitical prediction. Eastman, like his teammates, is constantly collecting perspectives anywhere he can, always adding to his intellectual range, so any ground is fertile for him.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, they had qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators—partners in sharing information and discussing predictions. Every team member still had to make individual predictions, but the team was scored by collective performance. On average, forecasters on the small superteams became 50 percent more accurate in their individual predictions. Superteams beat the wisdom of much larger crowds—in which the predictions of a large group of people are averaged—and they also beat prediction markets, where forecasters “trade” the outcomes of future events like stocks, and the market price represents the crowd prediction. It might seem like the complexity of predicting geopolitical and economic events would necessitate a group of narrow specialists, each bringing to the team extreme depth in one area. But it was actually the opposite. As with comic book creators and inventors patenting new technologies, in the face of uncertainty, individual breadth was critical. The foxiest forecasters were impressive alone, but together they exemplified the most lofty ideal of teams: they became more than the sum of their parts. A lot more.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Charles Darwin “could be considered a professional outsider,” according to creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton. Darwin was not a university faculty member nor a professional scientist at any institution, but he was networked into the scientific community. For a time, he focused narrowly on barnacles, but got so tired of it that he declared, “I am unwilling to spend more time on the subject,” in the introduction to a barnacle monograph. Like the 3M generalists and polymaths, he got bored sticking in one area, so that was that. For his paradigm-shattering work, Darwin’s broad network was crucial. Howard Gruber, a psychologist who studied Darwin’s journals, wrote that Darwin only personally carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. Darwin always juggled multiple projects, what Gruber called his “network of enterprise.” He had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into thirteen broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which “ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion.” When his chaotic notebooks became too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, the Azores, Jamaica, and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“University of Utah professor Abbie Griffin has made it her work to study modern Thomas Edisons—“serial innovators,” she and two colleagues termed them. Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: “high tolerance for ambiguity”; “systems thinkers”; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains”; “repurposing what is already available”; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process”; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways”; “synthesizing information from many different sources”; “they appear to flit among ideas”; “broad range of interests”; “they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests”; “need to learn significantly across multiple domains”; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.” Get the picture?”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“from pure fantasy and fairy tales to historical fiction, sci-fi, slapstick comedy, illustrated historical essays, action-adventure, and much more. Novelist, screenwriter, and comics author Neil Gaiman has a similarly expansive range, from journalism and essays on art to a fiction oeuvre encompassing both stories that can be read to (or by) the youngest readers as well as psychologically complex examinations of identity that have enthralled mainstream adult audiences. Jordan Peele is not a comics creator, but the writer and first-time director of the extraordinarily unique surprise hit Get Out struck a similar note when he credited comedy writing for his skill at timing information reveals in a horror film. “In product development,” Taylor and Greve concluded, “specialization can be costly.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Taylor and Greve expected a typical industrial production learning curve: creators learn by repetition, so creators making more comics in a given span of time would make better ones on average. They were wrong. Also, as had been shown in industrial production, they guessed that the more resources a publisher had, the better its creators’ average product would be. Wrong. And they made the very intuitive prediction that as creators’ years of experience in the industry increased, they would make better comics on average. Wrong again. A high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance. Years of experience had no impact at all. If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate? The answer (in addition to not being overworked) was how many of twenty-two different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi. Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“She is a “T-shaped person,” she said, one who has breadth, compared to an “I-shaped person,” who only goes deep, an analog to Dyson’s birds and frogs. “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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does. “This is a hazardous situation,” he warned, “for the young people and also for the future of science.” Fortunately, it is possible, even today, even at the cutting edge, even in the most hyperspecialized specialties, to cultivate land where both birds and frogs can thrive.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Where great minds of science failed, Parisian foodie and confectioner Nicolas Appert prevailed. Appert was a “jack of all trades,” according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. He had traversed the gustatory universe as a candy maker, vintner, chef, brewer, pickle maker, and more. His exceptionally wide-ranging culinary wanderings gave him an advantage over scientists who focused on the science of preservation. “Having spent my days in the pantries, the breweries, store-houses, and cellars of Champagne, as well as in the shops, manufactories, and warehouses of confectioners, distillers, and grocers,” he wrote in the aptly titled Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, “I have been able to avail myself, in my process, of a number of advantages, which the greater number of those persons have not possessed, who have devoted themselves to the art of preserving provisions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“What Ibarra calls the “plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image. It just isn’t true. Art historian William Wallace showed that Michelangelo was actually a test-and-learn all-star. He constantly changed his mind and altered his sculptural plans as he worked. He left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, each time moving on to something more promising. The first line of Wallace’s analysis: “Michelangelo did not expound a theory of art.” He tried, then went from there. He was a sculptor, painter, master architect, and made engineering designs for fortifications in Florence. In his late twenties he even pushed visual art aside to spend time writing poems (including one about how much he grew to dislike painting), half of which he left unfinished. Like anyone eager to raise their match quality prospects, Michelangelo learned who he was—and whom he was carving—in practice, not in theory. He started with an idea, tested it, changed it, and readily abandoned it for a better project fit. Michelangelo might have fit well in Silicon Valley; he was a relentless iterator. He worked according to Ibarra’s new aphorism: “I know who I am when I see what I do.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports,” she wrote. “Yes, 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 that doesn’t have a clear end goal.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Duckworth learned that the Whole Candidate Score—an agglomeration of standardized test scores, high school rank, physical fitness tests, and demonstrated leadership—is the single most important factor for admission, but that it is useless for predicting who will drop out before completing Beast. She had been talking to high performers across domains, and decided to study passion and perseverance, a combination she cleverly formulated as “grit.” She designed a self-assessment that captured the two components of grit. One is essentially work ethic and resilience, and the other is “consistency of interests”—direction, knowing exactly what one wants.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World