Range Quotes

“Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions. I just had a feeling all along that there was something wrong with the culture. We didn’t have a healthy tension in the system.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them. But there is an organizational strategy that can help. The strategy, strange as it sounds, is to send a mixed message.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In four separate fires in the 1990s, twenty-three elite wildland firefighters refused orders to drop their tools and perished beside them. Even when Rhoades eventually dropped his chainsaw, he felt like he was doing something unnatural. Weick found similar phenomena in Navy seamen who ignored orders to remove steel-toed shoes when abandoning a ship, and drowned or punched holes in life rafts; fighter pilots in disabled planes refusing orders to eject; and Karl Wallenda, the world-famous high-wire performer, who fell 120 feet to his death when he teetered and grabbed first at his balance pole rather than the wire beneath him. He momentarily lost the pole while falling, and grabbed it again in the air. “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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The very tool that had helped make NASA so consistently successful, what Diane Vaughan called “the original technical culture” in the agency’s DNA, suddenly worked perversely in a situation where the familiar brand of data did not exist. Reason without numbers was not accepted. In the face of an unfamiliar challenge, NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When information became more widely disseminated,” Ouderkirk told me, “it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“What its withered technology lacked, the Game Boy made up in user experience. It was cheap. It could fit in a large pocket. It was all but indestructible. If a drop cracked the screen—and it had to be a horrific drop—it kept on ticking. If it were left in a backpack that went in the washing machine, once it dried out it was ready to roll a few days later. Unlike its power-guzzling color competitors, it played for days (or weeks) on AA batteries. Old hardware was extremely familiar to developers inside and outside Nintendo, and with their creativity and speed unencumbered by learning new technology, they pumped out games as if they were early ancestors of iPhone app designers—Tetris, Super Mario Land, The Final Fantasy Legend, and a slew of sports games released in the first year were all smash hits. With simple technology, Yokoi’s team sidestepped the hardware arms race and drew the game programming community onto its team.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Godin argued that “winners”—he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In England and Wales, students were expected to pick a path with knowledge only of the limited menu they had been exposed to early in high school. That is sort of like being forced to choose at sixteen whether you want to marry your high school sweetheart. At the time it might seem like a great idea, but the more you experience, the less great that idea looks in hindsight. In England and Wales, adults were more likely to get divorced from the careers they had invested in because they settled down too early.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems, and Kepler was an analogy addict, so Gentner is naturally very fond of him.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In an age when alchemy was still a common approach to natural phenomena, Kepler filled the universe with invisible forces acting all around us, and helped usher in the Scientific Revolution. His fastidious documentation of every meandering path his brain blazed is one of the great records of a mind undergoing creative transformation. It is a truism to say that Kepler thought outside the box. But what he really did, whenever he was stuck, was to think entirely outside the domain.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The fadeout was not a disappearance of skill so much as the rest of the world catching up. The motor-skill equivalent would be teaching a kid to walk a little early. Everyone is going to learn it anyway, and while it might be temporarily impressive, there is no evidence that rushing it matters.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it’s often the case in group meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data people put in front of us.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Only years later—as an investigative journalist writing about poor scientific research—did I realize that I had committed statistical malpractice in one section of the thesis that earned me a master’s degree from Columbia University. Like many a grad student, I had a big database and hit a computer button to run a common statistical analysis, never having been taught to think deeply (or at all) about how that statistical analysis even worked. The stat program spit out a number summarily deemed “statistically significant.” Unfortunately, it was almost certainly a false positive, because I did not understand the limitations of the statistical test in the context in which I applied it. Nor did the scientists who reviewed the work. As statistician Doug Altman put it, “Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.” I rushed into extremely specialized scientific research without having learned scientific reasoning. (And then I was rewarded for it, with a master’s degree, which made for a very wicked learning environment.) As backward as it sounds, I only began to think broadly about how science should work years after I left it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“In 1931, amid that incredible transformation, a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting “natural experiment,” unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds. When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations—teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. Some were very simple: present skeins of wool or silk in an array of hues and ask participants to describe them. The collective farmers and farm leaders, as well as the female students, easily picked out blue, red, and yellow, sometimes with variations, like dark blue or light yellow. The most remote villagers, who were still “premodern,” gave more diversified descriptions: cotton in bloom, decayed teeth, a lot of water, sky, pistachio. Then they were asked to sort the skeins into groups. The collective farmers, and young people with even a little formal education, did so easily, naturally forming color groups. Even when they did not know the name of a particular color, they had little trouble putting together darker and lighter shades of the same one. The remote villagers, on the other hand, refused, even those whose work was embroidery. “It can’t be done,” they said, or, “None of them are the same, you can’t put them together.” When prodded vigorously, and only if they were allowed to make many small groups, some relented and created sets that were apparently random. A few others appeared to sort the skeins according to color saturation, without regard to the color. Geometric shapes followed suit. The greater the dose of modernity, the more likely an individual grasped the abstract concept of “shapes” and made groups of triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if they had no formal education and did not know the shapes’ names. The remote villagers, meanwhile, saw nothing alike in a square drawn with solid lines and the same exact square drawn with dotted lines. To Alieva, a twenty-six-year-old remote villager, the solid-line square was obviously a map, and the dotted-line square was a watch. “How can a map and a watch be put together?” she asked, incredulous. Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old remote villager, insisted that filled and unfilled circles could not go together because one was a coin and the other a moon.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“„Be careful not to be too careful“, Delbrück warned, „or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested...Be a flirt with your possible selves. Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. "Test and learn...”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Flynn conducted a study in which he compared the grade point averages of seniors at one of America’s top state universities, from neuroscience to English majors, to their performance on a test of critical thinking. The test gauged students’ ability to apply fundamental abstract concepts from economics, social and physical sciences, and logic to common, real-world scenarios. Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Compare aquilo que é hoje com aquilo que era ontem, não com as pessoas que são mais jovens do que é. Todos progredimos a um ritmo diferente, por isso não deixe que ninguém o faça sentir que se atrasou. Provavelmente, nem sequer sabe exatamente para onde vai, por isso sentir que está a ficar para trás não ajuda.”
― David Epstein, Range : Le règne des généralistes: Pourquoi ils triomphent dans un monde de spécialistes

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