Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World:
We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.
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.
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
If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.
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.
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.*
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.
Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.
everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.
Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
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.
breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, 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.
In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.
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.
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 domains"; "Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.
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.
First act and then think...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.
Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
it is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later. It is so deeply counterintuitive that it fools the learners themselves,
Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.
In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: 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.
Almost none of the students in any major showed a consistent understanding of how to apply methods of evaluating truth they had learned in their own discipline to other areas.
A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. •
We fail...tasks we don't have the guts to quit."...knowing when to quit is such a strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.
My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all this other knowledge inherently.
learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.
Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.
mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated
As each man amassed more information for his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.
