Range Quotes

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

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

“We know that early sampling is key, as is diversity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“smells, boats, brooms, magnets—it began with”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home - Frances Hesselbein”
― David Epstein, Range : Le règne des généralistes: Pourquoi ils triomphent dans un monde de spécialistes (Business)

“I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The gains are startling: three points every ten years.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“vary challenges within a domain drastically, and, as a fellow researcher put it, insist on “having one foot outside your world.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country—admission rested entirely on an audition—they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving—a lot less. “It seems very clear,” the psychologists wrote, “that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.” As to structured lessons, every single one of the students who had received a large amount of structured lesson time early in development fell into the “average” skill category, and not one was in the exceptional group. “The strong implication,” the researchers wrote, is “that that too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Like kind learning environments, a kind world is based on repeating patterns. “It’s perfectly fine,” she said, “if you stay in the same village or the same savannah all your life.” The current world is not so kind; it requires thinking that cannot fall back on previous experience. Like math students, we need to be able to pick a strategy for problems we have never seen before. “In the life we lead today,” Gentner told me, “we need to be reminded of things that are only abstractly or relationally similar. And the more creative you want to be, the more important that is.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In Tetlock’s twenty-year study, both foxes and hedgehogs were quick to update their beliefs after successful predictions, by reinforcing them even more strongly. When an outcome took them by surprise, however, foxes were much more likely to adjust their ideas. Hedgehogs barely budged. Some hedgehogs made authoritative predictions that turned out wildly wrong, and then updated their theories in the wrong direction. They became even more convinced of the original beliefs that led them astray. “Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“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.” In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.”
― 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: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“learn who we are only by living, and not before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Before-our-eyes progress reinforces our instinct to do more of the same, but just like the case of the typhoid doctor, the feedback teaches the wrong lesson. Learning deeply means learning slowly. The cult of the head start fails the learners it seeks to serve.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Do we really need to go through courses with very specialized knowledge that often provides a huge amount of stuff that is very detailed, very specialized, very arcane, and will be totally forgotten in a couple of weeks? 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: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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

“Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“totality, the picture is in line with a classic research finding that is not specific to music: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World