Range Quotes

“As Karim Lakhani put it after his InnoCentive research, a key to creative problem solving is tapping outsiders who use different approaches “so that the ‘home field’ for the problem does not end up constraining the solution.” Sometimes, the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Swanson saw opportunity. He realized he could make discoveries by connecting information from scientific articles in subspecialty domains that never cited one another and that had no scientists who worked together. For example, by systematically cross-referencing databases of literature from different disciplines, he uncovered “eleven neglected connections” between magnesium deficiency and migraine research, and proposed that they be tested. All of the information he found was in the public domain; it had just never been connected. “Undiscovered public knowledge,” Swanson called it. In 2012, the American Headache Society and the American Academy of Neurology reviewed all the research on migraine prevention and concluded that magnesium should be considered as a common treatment.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“When all you have is a volcanologist, I learned, every extinction looks like a volcano.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.” Like polymath inventors, Eastman and Cousins take ravenously from specialists and integrate”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“As organizational boxes get smaller and smaller, and as outsiders are more easily engaged online, “exploration [of new solutions] now increasingly resides outside the boundaries of the traditional firm,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“InnoCentive works in part because, as specialists become more narrowly focused, “the box” is more like Russian nesting dolls. Specialists divide into subspecialties, which soon divide into sub-subspecialties. Even if they get outside the small doll, they may get stuck inside the next, slightly larger one. Cragin and Davis were outside the box to begin with, and saw straightforward solutions that eluded insiders with seemingly every training and resource advantage.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Ibarra’s advice is nearly identical to the short-term planning the Dark Horse researchers documented. Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“In product development,” Taylor and Greve concluded, “specialization can be costly.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end of history illusion.” From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.”
― 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. That feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The people we study who are fulfilled do pursue a long-term goal, but they only formulate it after a period of discovery,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Hesselbein decided then that a community that valued inclusiveness should answer “yes” to the question, “When they look at us, can they find themselves?”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“No one in their right mind would argue that passion and perseverance are unimportant, or that a bad day is a cue to quit. But the idea that a change of interest, or a recalibration of focus, is an imperfection and competitive disadvantage leads to a simple, one-size-fits-all Tiger story: pick and stick, as soon as possible. Responding to lived experience with a change of direction, like Van Gogh did habitually, like West Point graduates have been doing since the dawn of the knowledge economy, is less tidy but no less important. It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

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

“The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Duckworth learned that the Whole Candidate Score—an agglomeration of standardized test scores, high school rank, physical fitness tests, and demonstrated leadership—is the single most important factor for admission, but that it is useless for predicting who will drop out before completing Beast. She had been talking to high performers across domains, and decided to study passion and perseverance, a combination she cleverly formulated as “grit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The English and Welsh students were specializing so early that they were making more mistakes. Malamud’s conclusion: “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

“the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The professed necessity of hyperspecialization forms the core of a vast, successful, and sometimes well-meaning marketing machine, in sports and beyond”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains. The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. Those labs were Keplers by committee. They included members with a wide variety of experiences and interests.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Kepler did something that turns out to be characteristic of today’s world-class research labs. Psychologist Kevin Dunbar began documenting how productive labs work in the 1990s, and stumbled upon a modern version of Keplerian thinking. Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new—and analogies served as the wilderness guide.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“And the more distant the analogy, the better it was for idea generation. Students who were pointed to Nike and McDonald’s generated more strategic options than their peers who were reminded of computer companies Apple and Dell. Just being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative. Unfortunately, students also said that if they were to use analogy companies at all, they believed the best way to generate strategic options would be to focus on a single example in the same field. Like the venture capitalists, their intuition was to use too few analogies, and to rely on those that were the most superficially similar. “That’s usually exactly the wrong way to go about it regardless of what you’re using analogy for,” Lovallo told me.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Interestingly, if the researchers used only the single film that the movie fans ranked as most analogous to the new release, predictive power collapsed. What seemed like the single best analogy did not do well on its own. Using a full “reference class” of analogies—the pillar of the outside view—was immensely more accurate.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Netflix came to a similar conclusion for improving its recommendation algorithm. Decoding movies’ traits to figure out what you like was very complex and less accurate than simply analogizing you to many other customers with similar viewing histories. Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“around 90 percent of major infrastructure projects worldwide go over budget (by an average of 28 percent) in part because managers focus on the details of their project and become overly optimistic. Project managers can become like Kahneman’s curriculum-building team, which decided that thanks to its roster of experts it would certainly not encounter the same delays as did other groups.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World