Range Quotes

“highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called "far transfer.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“The ultimate lesson of the question was that detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.” Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Interventional cardiologists have gotten so used to treating chest pain with stents—metal tubes that pry open blood vessels—that they do so reflexively even in cases where voluminous research has proven that they are inappropriate or dangerous. A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting, when thousands of cardiologists were away; the researchers suggested it could be because common treatments of dubious effect were less likely to be performed.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“I will not intercept your decisions that belong in your chain of command, but I will give and receive information anywhere in the organization, at any time. I just can’t get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams—they were less likely to produce a smash hit—but as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams: an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had collective experience across the same number of genres. 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

“It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for nonspecialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“This is a widespread phenomenon. If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario—physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician—the more likely you are to say that the scenario you are investigating will occur. Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem. That happens to be a hallmark of expert problem solving. Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures. In that way, they are just about the precise opposite of experts who develop in kind learning environments, like chess masters, who rely heavily on intuition.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“And he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on the overall estate rather than any of its parts. . . . And Nikolay’s management produced the most brilliant results. —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Especially now, when all the information is on your phone. You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that NASA’s culture “emphasized chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.” Once again, “allegiance to hierarchy and procedure” had ended in disaster. Again, lower ranking engineers had concerns they could not quantify; they stayed silent because “the requirement for data was stringent and inhibiting.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Ukrainian boxer Vasyl Lomachenko set a record for the fewest fights needed to win world titles in three different weight classes. Lomachenko, who took four years off boxing as a kid to learn traditional Ukrainian dance, reflected, “I was doing so many different sports as a young boy—gymnastics, basketball, football, tennis—and I think, ultimately, everything came together with all those different kinds of sports to enhance my footwork.”
― David Epstein, Range: How 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

“an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the study suggested that “admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“including thousands of paintings in his unique, semi-cartoonish style, often densely packed with animals and figures—Elvis, George Washington, angels—and set fancifully in apocalyptic landscapes. In short order, he was appearing on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and creating album covers for R.E.M. and Talking Heads. Upon entry to the garden, I was greeted by a giant self-portrait of a smirking Finster in a burgundy suit, affixed to a cinderblock wall. At the bottom are the words “I began painting pictures in Jan-1976—without any training. This is my painting. 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

“When I was a college runner, I had teammates whose drive and determination seemed almost boundless on the track, and nearly absent in the classroom, and 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

“Paul Graham, computer scientist and cofounder of Y Combinator—the start-up funder of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch—encapsulated Ibarra’s tenets in a high school graduation speech he wrote, but never delivered: It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. . . . 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. And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don’t give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. . . . . . . Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? 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

“It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer's disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer's disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it's a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In that way, the students had something in common with Luria’s remote villagers—even the science majors were typically unable to generalize research methods from their own field to other fields. Flynn’s conclusion: “There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task,” she wrote. “It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“a system that leads people to downplay previous experiences, as if they were entirely wasted, is a counterproductive one. We shouldn’t be ashamed of broad experience, or of needing time to find match quality. Take it from Angela Duckworth, the researcher whose work popularized the psychological construct of “grit.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World