Read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world

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.

Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

Source: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world by David Epstein

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Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world by David Epstein is a book about the benefits of breadth in the modern world. One of the issues raised throughout is that specialisation focuses on complicated problems, but does not necessarily help with wicked complex problems. Grit and expertise only get you so far.

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.

One of the benefits of breadth is the opportunity to come to a problem as an outsider, but with a range of references to draw upon.

In some ways this book reminds me of Amy Burvall’s argument to collecting the dots, as well as the art of holding on tightly and letting go lightly. However, breadth verses depth is also something of a wicked problem.

The If Books Could Kill podcast raised the problem that the breadth of research and anecdotes thrown together in these sorts of books can sometimes be problematic. Or as Tosin Adeoti raised in a review, it is hard to ‘distinguish fact from assumption’:

While I believe that there might be valuable insights in the book, most of them are embedded within contextually bare stories that are edited to fit a particular narrative. It is nearly impossible to distinguish fact from assumption. I suggest reading each chapter heading and skipping straight to the last two pages for a brief summary of the argument, thus avoiding wasting time on unnecessary fluff. Then, use those topics as a starting point for further study.

Source: Book Review By ‘Tosin Adeoti

I therefore wonder if the book is useful as a provocation as much as a manual for success. For example, Martin Weller looks past some of the over-simplified findings to reflect upon his experiences of ‘range’, whether it be offering different forms of assessment, the rewards that come from a breadth of experience and the benefits of different perspectives on a situation.

Going beyond the question of success, if the focus is on wicked problems, I feel that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work is a better place to start? I was also reminded of Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question too in regards to engaging with the unfamiliar.

MarginaliaCHAPTER 1: The Cult of the Head Start

Tellingly, Marcus gave me this analogy for the current limits of expert machines: “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

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

CHAPTER 2: How the Wicked World Was Made

Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.

I remember nothing about stoichiometry, but I use Fermi thinking regularly, breaking down a problem so I can leverage what little I know to start investigating what I don’t, a “similarities” problem of sorts.

CHAPTER 4: Learning, Fast and Slow

Knowledge increasingly needs not merely to be durable, but also flexible—both sticky and capable of broad application.

Knowledge with enduring utility must be very flexible, composed of mental schemes that can be matched to new problems. The virtual naval officers in the air defense simulation and the math students who engaged in interleaved practice were learning to recognize deep structural commonalities in types of problems. They could not rely on the same type of problem repeating, so they had to identify underlying conceptual connections in simulated battle threats, or math problems, that they had never actually seen before. They then matched a strategy to each new problem. When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called “far transfer.”

CHAPTER 5: Thinking Outside Experience

As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”

CHAPTER 6: The Trouble with Too Much Grit

Labor economist Kirabo Jackson has demonstrated that even the dreaded administrative headache known as “teacher turnover” captures the value of informed switching. He found that teachers are more effective at improving student performance after they switch to a new school, and that the effect is not explained by switching to higher-achieving schools or better students. “Teachers tend to leave schools at which they are poorly matched,” he concluded. “Teacher turnover . . . may in fact move us closer to an optimal allocation of teachers to schools.”

CHAPTER 7: Flirting with Your Possible Selves

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,” he told me. “Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with getting a law or medical degree or PhD. But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed. People realize things about themselves halfway through medical school.”

Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.

And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don’t give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. . . .
. . . Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

Finster immediately began an oeuvre of tens of thousands of artworks that filled his property, including thousands of paintings in his unique, semi-cartoonish style, often densely packed with animals and figures—Elvis, George Washington, angels—and set fancifully in apocalyptic landscapes. In short order, he was appearing on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and creating album covers for R.E.M. and Talking Heads. Upon entry to the garden, I was greeted by a giant self-portrait of a smirking Finster in a burgundy suit, affixed to a cinderblock wall. At the bottom are the words “I began painting pictures in Jan-1976—without any training. This is my painting. A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”

CHAPTER 8: The Outsider Advantage

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.

CHAPTER 9: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.”

He felt that the lateral and vertical thinkers were best together, even in highly technical fields.
Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does. “This is a hazardous situation,” he warned, “for the young people and also for the future of science.”

As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”

CHAPTER 10: Fooled by Expertise

Hedgehog experts were deep but narrow. Some had spent their careers studying a single problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashioned tidy theories of how the world works through the single lens of their specialty, and then bent every event to fit them. The hedgehogs, according to Tetlock, “toil devotedly” within one tradition of their specialty, “and reach for formulaic solutions to ill-defined problems.” Outcomes did not matter; they were proven right by both successes and failures, and burrowed further into their ideas. It made them outstanding at predicting the past, but dart-throwing chimps at predicting the future. The foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represented narrowness, foxes ranged outside a single discipline or theory and embodied breadth.

It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to.

Kahan and colleagues measured science curiosity cleverly, smuggling relevant questions into what looked like consumer marketing surveys, and tracking how people pursued follow-up information after viewing videos with particular content, some of them science-related. The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, whether or not it agreed with their current beliefs. Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs: they became more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge. Those who were high in science curiosity bucked that trend. Their foxy hunt for information was like a literal fox’s hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully, and consume omnivorously. Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. 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,” wrote Jonathan Baron, the psychologist who developed measurements of active open-mindedness.

Basically, forecasters can improve by generating a list of separate events with deep structural similarities, rather than focusing only on internal details of the specific event in question. Few events are 100 percent novel—uniqueness is a matter of degree, as Tetlock puts it—and creating the list forces a forecaster implicitly to think like a statistician.

CHAPTER 11: Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools

As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge. Even the most sacred tools. Even the tools so taken for granted they become invisible. It is, of course, easier said than done. Especially when the tool is the very core of an organization’s culture.

It is a difficult balancing act, cultivating aspects of a culture that seem on their face to push against one another. There are no rules for the qualitative hunches of space shuttle engineers or pararescue jumpers lacking intel. Incongruence, as the experimental research testified, helps people to discover useful cues, and to drop the traditional tools when it makes sense.

CHAPTER 12: Deliberate Amateurs

“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.”

In 1981, a new disease emerges that nobody knows anything about. In 1984, it’s found to be a retrovirus, HIV. In 1987, you have the first therapy. In 1996, you have such effective therapy that people don’t have to die of it anymore. How did that happen? Was it because companies all of a sudden rushed to make drugs? No. If you really look back and analyze it, before that time society had spent some of its very hard-earned money to study a curiosity called retroviruses. Just a curiosity in animals. So by the time HIV was found to be a retrovirus, you already knew that if you interfered with the protease [a type of enzyme] that you could deactivate it. 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. It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer’s disease, you would never get to the solution. But 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.”

When engineer Bill Gore left DuPont to form the company that invented Gore-Tex, he fashioned it after his observation that companies do their most impactful creative work in a crisis, because the disciplinary boundaries fly out the window. “Communication really happens in the carpool,” he once said. He made sure that “dabble time” was a cultural staple.

CONCLUSION: Expanding Your Range

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.

Reviews

Although the book unfolds according to a formula that has become familiar — story, study, lesson; rinse and repeat — the storytelling is so dramatic, the wielding of data so deft and the lessons so strikingly framed that it’s never less than a pleasure to read. Indeed, so smooth and persuasive is Epstein’s marshaling of evidence that I almost failed to notice an ambiguity lurking at the heart of his case.

So Epstein gives us two distinct reasons for thinking the generalist might have an edge over the specialist: (1) Generalists are better at navigating “wicked” learning environments. (2) Generalists end up with better “match quality.” What he doesn’t seem to notice is that these two reasons imply contradictory prescriptions on how to live. If life is “wicked,” you should start off broad and stay that way. If life is about “match quality,” then you should start off broad and then go narrow when you find what hits your sweet spot. What are we to do?

Let’s say, as a crude approximation, that “Success = talent + practice + luck.” Those who are richly endowed with talent may find it easy to excel in multiple domains, to be Renaissance men and women, to be decathletes of life.

Source: Remember the ‘10,000 Hours’ Rule for Success? Forget About It By Jim Holt

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In true generalist fashion, Epstein examines several disciplines to support his argument, highlighting exemplars from art, science, education, and business. For example, Nintendo’s all-time most influential video-game innovator, Gunpei Yokoi, had no specific life plans when he took the job. His advantage emerged from his experiences as a hobbyist, inventor, and tinkerer. Epstein also advocates for late bloomers, among them Vincent van Gogh, who only started painting in earnest at age thirty-three, and former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein, whose professional career began when she was in her mid-fifties.

Source: Review: “Range” by Oren Smilansky

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One way you know if a book is any good is if you are still thinking about it a year after you read it. (Or five years, or a decade, etc. The longer you think about a book the better you know it is.) Another way to know if a book is good is if it seems like every week you read an article that could be a supplementary chapter.

Source: David Epstein’s Range by Austin Kleon

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