Range Quotes

“Instead, she told me, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom, “First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Teaching kids to read a little early is not a lasting advantage. Teaching them how to hunt for and connect contextual clues to understand what they read can be. As with all desirable difficulties, the trouble is that a head start comes fast, but deep learning is slow. “The slowest growth,” the researchers wrote, occurs “for the most complex skills.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Short-term rehearsal gave purely short-term benefits. 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. The group with more and immediate rehearsal opportunity recalled nearly nothing on the pop quiz. Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle. It isn’t bad to get an answer right while studying. Progress just should not happen too quickly,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “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

“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

“A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.” Labor”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The most momentous personality changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a person who does not yet exist. It could work, but it makes for worse odds. Plus, while personality change slows, it does not stop at any age. Sometimes it can actually happen instantly.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the foxiest forecasters—just bright people with wide-ranging interests and reading habits but no particular relevant background”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“...he preferred to view his crew leadership not as decision making, but as sensemaking. "If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it. I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it...If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted to complexity, and that has manifested in flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world. In every cognitive direction, the minds of premodern citizens were severely constrained by the concrete world before them.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Compared to the Tiger Mother’s tome, a parenting manual oriented toward creative achievement would have to open with a much shorter list of rules. In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“InnoCentive solvers rate problems on how relevant they were to their own field of specialization, and found that “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ 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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

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

“Each dark horse had a novel journey, but a common strategy. “Short-term planning,” Ogas told me. “They all practice it, not long-term planning.” Even people who look like consummate long-term visionaries from afar usually looked like short-term planners up close.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The expression “young and foolish,” he wrote, describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential reward is extremely high. Thanks to constant feedback and an unforgiving weed-out process, those who try will learn quickly if they might be a match, at least compared to jobs with less constant feedback. If they aren’t, they go test something else, and continue to gain information about their options and themselves.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“Just as it is in golf, procedure practice is important in math. But when it comprises the entire math training strategy, it’s a problem. “Students do not view mathematics as a system,” Richland and her colleagues wrote. They view it as just a set of procedures.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. 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

“And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“A team or organization that is both reliable and flexible, according to Weick, is like a jazz group. There are fundamentals—scales and chords—that every member must overlearn, but those are just tools for sensemaking in a dynamic environment. There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World