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Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David J. Epstein

Last accessed on Friday April 1, 2022

19 Highlight(s) | 4 Note(s)

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Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

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Nobel laureates are far more likely still. The most successful experts also belong to the wider world. “To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”

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In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.

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Used for learning, testing, including self-testing, is a very desirable difficulty.

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For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.

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Evaluating an array of options before letting intuition reign is a trick for the wicked world.

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The Trouble with Too Much Grit

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Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

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“admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.”

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professional poker player Maria Konnikova explained in her book The Confidence Game how the sunk cost mindset is so deeply entrenched that conmen know to begin by asking their marks for several small favors or investments before progressing to large asks. Once a mark has invested energy or money, rather than walking away from sunk costs he will continue investing, more than he ever wanted to, even as, to any rational observer, disaster becomes imminent.

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Wrong question. “Oh, don’t ask me what my training was,” she replied with a dismissing hand wave. She explained that she just did whatever seemed like it would teach her something and allow her to be of service at each moment, and somehow that added up to training.

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another new troop leader complain that she was getting nothing from the session. Hesselbein mentioned it to a dress-factory worker who was also volunteering, and the woman told her, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.

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Themes emerged in the transitions. The protagonists had begun to feel unfulfilled by their work, and then a chance encounter with some world previously invisible to them led to a series of short-term explorations.

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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.

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“I know who I am when I see what I do.”

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A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”

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Comic creators developed superheroes with complex emotional problems; Maus became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize; the avante-garde Love and Rockets created an ethnically diverse cast that aged with readers in real time.

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“In product development,” Taylor and Greve concluded, “specialization can be costly.”

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Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: “high tolerance for ambiguity”; “systems thinkers”; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains”; “repurposing what is already available”; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process”; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways”; “synthesizing information from many different sources”; “they appear to flit among ideas”; “broad range of interests”; “they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests”; “need to learn significantly across multiple domains”; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.” Get the picture?

Note:This is me

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