Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World | David Epstein

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world's top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

David Epstein examined the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.

There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.

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 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 Woods’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 Rogers (Roger Federer): people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.

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.

Talent Is Overrated

One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when he described analyzing the world in an age of technological and social change, “No tool is omnicompetent.”

The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.

Training with hints does not produce any lasting learning. Training without hints is slow and error-ridden. The struggle is real, and really useful. “Like life, retrieval is all about the journey.”

What a "poor advice"

It is what it sounds like—leaving time between practice sessions for the same material. You might call it deliberate not-practicing between bouts of deliberate practice. “There’s a limit to how long you should wait,” Kornell told, “but it’s longer than people think. It could be anything, studying foreign language vocabulary or learning how to fly a plane, the harder it is, the more you learn.”

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. As with all desirable difficulties, the trouble is that a head start comes fast, but deep learning is slow. “The slowest growth,” the researchers wrote, "occurs for the most complex skills."

Admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice. Levitt identified one of his own most important skills as “the willingness to jettison” a project or an entire area of study for a better fit.

Switchers are Winners

On the final weekend of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sasha Cohen, a 2006 silver medalist figure skater, wrote an advice column to retiring athletes. “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.

As Steven Naifeh said regarding Van Gogh’s life, some “undefinable process of digestion” occurred as diverse experiences accumulated. He was unaware that he was being prepared.

Each dark horse had a novel journey, but a common strategy. “Short-term planning, they all practice it, not long-term planning.” Even people who look like consummate long-term visionaries from afar usually looked like short-term planners up close. When Nike cofounder Phil Knight was asked in 2016 about his long-term vision and how he knew what he wanted when he created the company, he replied that he had actually known he wanted to be a professional athlete. But he was not good enough, so he shifted to simply trying to find some way to stay involved with sports. He happened to run track under a college coach who tinkered with shoes and who later became his cofounder. “I feel sorry for the people who know exactly what they’re going to do from the time they’re sophomores in high school,” he said. In his memoir, Knight wrote that he “wasn’t much for setting goals,” and that his main goal for his nascent shoe company was to fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture. He made one short-term pivot after another, applying the lessons as he went.

We learn who we are only by living, and not before.

We maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat. 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. “First act and then think.”

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

The further the problem is from the solver’s expertise, the more likely he is to solve it. Sometimes, learning involves putting experience aside entirely. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.

Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.

Deliberate Amateurs

Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Nobel prized Andre Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “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,” Lewis wrote. When Geim was asked (two years before the Nobel) to describe his research style for a science newsletter, he offered this: “It is rather unusual, I have to say. I do not dig deep—I graze shallow. So ever since I was a postdoc, I would go into a different subject every five years or so. . . . I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.” Deviating from what Geim calls the “straight railway line” of life is “not secure . . . psychologically,” but comes with advantages, for motivation and for “questioning things people who work in that area never bother to ask.” They embrace what Max Delbrück, a Nobel laureate who studied the intersection of physics and biology, called “the principle of limited sloppiness.” Be careful not to be too careful, Delbrück warned, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.

Always read outside your field, everyday something.  And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ 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.

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.

Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful. It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla’s tired.