Range Quotes

“Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

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

“Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

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

“The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“...problem solving "begins with the typing of the problem."..."a problem well put is half-solved.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The average expert was a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, academic degrees, and even (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that some future event was impossible or nearly impossible, it nonetheless occurred 15 percent of the time. When they declared a sure thing, it failed to transpire more than one-quarter of the time.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major—a trend that includes math and science majors—after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline. One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when he described analyzing the world in an age of technological and social change, “No tool is omnicompetent.” •”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“At the first ever Girl Scout training event Hesselbein attended, she heard another new troop leader complain that she was getting nothing from the session. Hesselbein mentioned it to a dress-factory worker who was also volunteering, and the woman told her, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience. It is a natural philosophy for someone who was sixty when she attempted to turn down an interview for the job that became her calling. She had no long-term plan, only a plan to do what was interesting or needed at the moment. “I never envisioned” is her most popular preamble. Hesselbein’s professional career, which started in her midfifties, was extraordinary. The meandering path, however, was not.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training. All slow down learning and make performance suffer, in the short term.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation. And those who have won the Nobel Prize are more likely still. Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Twenty thousand volunteers responded, agonizing over everything from whether they should get a tattoo, try online dating, or have a child, to the 2,186 people who were pondering a job change.* But could they really trust a momentous decision to chance? The answer for the potential job changers who flipped heads was: only if they wanted to be happier. Six months later, those who flipped heads and switched jobs were substantially happier than the stayers.* According to Levitt, the study suggested that “admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.” Levitt identified one of his own most important skills as “the willingness to jettison” a project or an entire area of study for a better fit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he [Oliver Smithies] told me. 'Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“As the company grew, he worried that young engineers would be too concerned about looking stupid to share ideas for novel uses of old technology, so he began intentionally blurting out crazy ideas at meetings to set the tone.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Yokoi had no desire (or capability) to compete with electronics companies that were racing one another to invent some entirely new sliver of dazzling technology. Nor could Nintendo compete with Japan’s titans of traditional toys—Bandai, Epoch, and Takara—on their familiar turf. With that, and Drive Game, in mind, Yokoi embarked on an approach he called “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses. By “withered technology,” Yokoi meant tech that was old enough to be extremely well understood and easily available, so it didn’t require a specialist’s knowledge. The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World