Range
Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
The current culture promotes specialising, deliberately practicing over and over, getting a head start and staying in our lane
However, with an ever-changing, complex world, we need generalists to connect ideas, provide innovation, think differently.
There is a huge advantage to be gained through obtaining diverse experiences, learning slow and taking a windy route before specialising.
🎨 Impressions
The case studies were generally very interesting, and original - although some included unnecessary historical details. This book sets up a great argument demonstrating how we need more generalists in the world today, and how we promote specialism without appreciating the full implications.
How I Discovered It
Bill Gates often recommends this book. I thought this would give me some new ideas as I am often torn by the question of depth vs breadth.
Who Should Read It?
If you are a specialist or generalist and are struggling to see the benefits of the other, this will provide you with some points to reconsider. If you are looking to see how to connect dots in the world today - this book will give you plenty of ideas.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
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.
Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
📒 Summary + Notes
The Trend of Specialization
Tiger Woods has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it.
Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year.
The Case for Generalists
One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities. I found a raft of studies that showed how 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. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators.
Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem.
Specialization has created a system of parallel trenches in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.
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.
While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger Wood's precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more generalists, people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
Different Domains
The domains in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully were termed as “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly.
The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years.
However, in wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
Human Strength is the Big Picture
The more a task shifts to an open world of big-picture strategy, the more humans have to add. We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive.
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.
The progress of AI in the closed and orderly world of chess, with instant feedback and bottomless data, has been exponential. In the rule-bound but messier world of driving, AI has made tremendous progress, but challenges remain. In a truly open-world problem devoid of rigid rules and reams of perfect historical data, AI has been disastrous.
AI systems are like savants. They need stable structures and narrow worlds. When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time—chess, golf, playing classical music—an argument can be made for savant-like hyperspecialized practice from day one. But those are poor models of most things humans want to learn.
The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another. They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.
Abstraction and Transferring Knowledge
We now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” This means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another. We have grown up in a world of classification schemes totally foreign to remote parts of the world.
Conceptual schemes are flexible, able to arrange information and ideas for a wide variety of uses, and to transfer knowledge between domains. 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 it accessible and flexible.
Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.
Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience.
And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. 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.
Our Mistake about Head Starts
Parents, Yates told me, increasingly come to him and “want their kids doing what the Olympians are doing right now, not what the Olympians were doing when they were twelve or thirteen,” which included a wider variety of activities that developed their general athleticism and allowed them to probe their talents and interests before they focused narrowly on technical skills. The sampling period is not incidental to the development of great performers—something to be excised in the interest of a head start—it is integral.
Learning Slow
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.
When younger students bring home problems that force them to make connections, parents say ‘Lemme show you, there’s a faster, easier way.’” If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.
One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. Socrates was apparently on to something when he forced pupils to generate answers rather than bestowing them. It requires the learner to intentionally sacrifice current performance for future benefit.
Being forced to generate answers improves subsequent learning even if the generated answer is wrong. It can even help to be wildly wrong.
In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.
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.
Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training. All slow down learning and make performance suffer, in the short term.
Researchers found that early childhood education programs teach “closed” skills that can be acquired quickly with repetition of procedures, but that everyone will pick up at some point anyway. 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.
The research team recommended that if programs want to impart lasting academic benefits they should focus instead on “open” skills that scaffold later knowledge. 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.
Like kind learning environments, a kind world is based on repeating patterns is fine 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.
Analogies
In the life we lead today, 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.
They will stay inside of the problem at hand, focused on the internal details, and perhaps summon other medical knowledge, since it is on the surface a medical problem. They will not intuitively turn to distant analogies to probe solutions. They should, though, and they should make sure some of those analogies are, on the surface, far removed from the current problem. In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous. The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.
Be an Outsider
The investors initially judged their own projects, where they knew all the details, completely differently from similar projects to which they were outsiders.
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.
Just being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative. successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context. For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.”
“When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual,”
Purposefully Foolish
It’s sort of like the stock market, you need a mixture of strategies. And those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.
With less sampling opportunity, more students headed down a narrow path before figuring out if it was a good one.
Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.
The expression “young and foolish,” 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.
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.
With more knowledge of their skills and preferences, choosing to pursue a different goal was no longer the gritless route; it was the smart one.
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 behaviour that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning.
Diverse Experiences - A Windy Path
Some undefinable process of digestion occurred as diverse experiences accumulated.
Ogas uses the shorthand “standardization covenant” for the cultural notion that it is rational to trade a winding path of self-exploration for a rigid goal with a head start because it ensures stability. “The people we study who are fulfilled do pursue a long-term goal, but they only formulate it after a period of discovery,”
But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed.
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.
Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts. Each “story of me” continues to evolve. we learn who we are only by living, and not before.
Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat. If that sounds facile, consider that it is precisely the opposite of a vast marketing crusade that assures customers they can alight on their perfect matches via introspection alone. “All of the strengths-finder stuff, it gives people license to pigeonhole themselves or others in ways that just don’t take into account how much we grow and evolve and blossom and discover new things,”
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.
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.
“I thought about the process that differentiates solutions, and it wasn’t part of any curriculum or on anybody’s résumé. I realized there was always going to be this somewhat serendipitous outside thinking that was going to make a solution more clever, cost-effective, efficacious, more on the money than anyone else’s.
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,”
for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. (Think about the lab with only E. coli specialists from chapter 5.) If those fail, they’re stuck.
“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.”
“lateral thinking with withered technology.” Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses. By “withered technology,” Yokoi meant tech that was old enough to be extremely well understood and easily available, so it didn’t require a specialist’s knowledge. The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered.
Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.
breadth helped him identify them. “If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.” Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.
Often if you’re too much of an insider, it’s hard to get good perspective.” The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them. “Depth can be inadequate without breadth,”
In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed. 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.
Drop the Tools You Know
Rather than adapting to unfamiliar situations, whether airline accidents or fire tragedies, experienced groups became rigid under pressure and regress to what they know best. They behaved like a collective specialist, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone, as if trying to will it to become something they actually had experienced before.
Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on what called overlearned behaviour. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behaviour has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool. Research on aviation accidents, for example, found that a common pattern was the crew’s decision to continue with their original plan even when conditions changed dramatically.
We make mistakes of conformity. They stuck to the usual tools in the face of an unusual challenge.
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. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
They were learning with experience, and their predictions became more accurate. The managers were benefitting from incongruence. The formal, conformist company process rules were balanced out by an informal culture of individual autonomy in decision making and dissent from the typical way of doing things.
Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, is insufficient to grapple with humanity’s greatest challenges. We have long known the laws of thermodynamics, but struggle to predict the spread of a forest fire. We know how cells work, but can’t predict the poetry that will be written by a human made up of them. The frog’s-eye view of individual parts is not enough. A healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity.
Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.
Deliberate Amateurs
The word “amateur,” did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavour. A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun.
Be careful not to be too careful, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.
The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.
Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.
Develop Inefficiencies
At its core, all hyperspecialization is a well-meaning drive for efficiency—the most efficient way to develop a sports skill, assemble a product, learn to play an instrument, or work on a new technology. But inefficiency needs cultivating too. The wisdom of a laser-focused, efficient development is limited to narrowly constructed, kind learning environments. When you push the boundaries, a lot of it is just probing. It has to be inefficient. What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.
Conclusions
Told in retrospect for popular media, stories of innovation and self-discovery can look like orderly journeys from A to B. Sort of like how inspirational-snippet accounts of the journeys of elite athletes appear straightforward, but the stories usually get murkier when examined in depth or over time.
The popular notion of the Tiger path minimizes the role of detours, breadth, and experimentation. It is attractive because it is a tidy prescription, low on uncertainty and high on efficiency. After all, who doesn’t like a head start? Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common, and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational-poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.
Going where no one has is a wicked problem. There is no well-defined formula or perfect system of feedback to follow. It’s like the stock market that way; if you want the sky highs, you have to tolerate a lot of lows.
One sentence advice: Don’t feel behind.
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.
Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.
