Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

good

This book has a point, but could have been half the length. It revolves around same topic without building too much on it, and some examples are consumingly long and unnecessarily detailed which even derails you from main point. I liked it, but became too repetitive after half of it.

It was exciting reading this book. the book was not very comfortable to read due to small font. I would avoid buying the mass market edition.

Good for knowledge

The books great argument against specialization, especially early specialization.

“The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus… Both training and professional incentives are aligning to accelerate specialization, creating intellectual archipelagos.”In Range, David Epstein examines the advantages of having a range of experiences, a broader perspective, an interdisciplinary approach, and the value of flexible thinking and reasoning in a world full complexity and uncertainty where precise, deterministic solutions are unknowable.SAMPLING PERIOD. The book starts by contrasting Tiger Woods, who began golfing at age two, and Roger Federer, who dabbled in a lot of activities before taking up competitive tennis. “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: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress.”“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.” Yo-Yo Ma “started on violin, moved to piano, and then to the cello because he didn’t really like the first two instruments.”“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… 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.’”MATCH QUALITY. Northwestern University economist Ofer Malmud studied match quality, “a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities… For the period he studied, English and Welsh students had to specialize before college so that they could apply to specific, narrow programs… In Scotland… students were actually required to study different fields for their first two years of college… It should come as no surprise that more students in Scotland ultimately majored in subjects that did not exist in their high schools, like engineering.” Graduates in England and Wales were more likely to switch careers.“Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. ‘If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Orgas said, ‘they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.” This reminds me of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow.“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 the new things.”KIND OR WICKED? Epstein explains the difference between “kind” learning environments, where patterns repeat predictably, and “wicked” learning environments.“In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly… Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient.”“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. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lesson.”“Our ability to think relationally… analogical thinking… allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts. It also allows us to understand that which we cannot see at all… It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems.”“Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable… In a wicked world, relying on experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.”HEDGEHOGS AND FOXES. “The narrow-view hedgehogs, who ‘know one big thing,’ and the integrator foxes, who ‘know many little things’” are good metaphors. “Beneath complexity, hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise, like repeating patterns on a chessboard. Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic. There are unknowns, and luck, and even when history apparently repeats, it does not do so precisely. They recognize that they are operating in the very definition of a wicked learning environment, where it can be very hard to learn from either wins or losses.”DEFINING A PROBLEM TOO NARROWLY. “Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, in insufficient to grapple with humanity’s greatest challenges.”ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE. Epstein explains how “incongruence” shifts the culture from mindlessly following standard procedures to encouraging critical thinking and good judgment. The book includes a life-or-death example of this sort of nimble thinking involving a team of U.S. Air Force pararescue jumpers.The book also includes a very interesting post-mortem analysis of the NASA Challenger shuttle catastrophe. “Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was one of the members of the commission that investigated the Challenger and in one hearing he admonished a NASA manager for repeating that Boisjoly’s data did not prove his point. ‘When you don’t have any data,’ Feynman said, ‘you have to use reason.’”Psychologist and organizational behavior expert Karl Weick coined the term “dropping one’s tools” as a metaphor for “unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility.”“These are, by definition, wicked situations. Wildland firefighters and space shuttle engineers do not have the liberty to train for their most challenging moments by trial and error. A team or organization that is both reliable and flexible, according to Weick, is like a jazz group. There are fundamentals—scales and chords—that every member must overlearn, but those are just tools for sensemaking in a dynamic environment. There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge. Even the most scared 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.”RESEARCH AND INNOVATION. Epstein quotes Arturo Casadevall, chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “If you write an interdisciplinary grant proposal, it goes to people who are really, really specialized in A or B, and maybe if you’re lucky they have the capacity to see the connections at the interface of A and B… Everyone acknowledges that great progress is made at the interface, but who is there to defend the interface?”The book includes a great example of how knowledge from an unlikely field—concrete mixing—helped to solve a problem that petrochemical engineers working on the Exxon Valdez oil spill were unable to solve within their own domain.“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration into a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”This book came highly recommended and it did not disappoint. It nicely complements books I’ve read about complexity and efficiency.

This is a beautifully written and well justified discussion of the various specific things that are not taken into account by the widespread cultural emphasis on early specialization for success and our popular model of performance in terms of domain-specific expertise.This takes the form of a single conclusion which I would paraphrase as: "we need to be able to play and explore widely and to color outside the lines for a while in order to become very good at solving the difficult problems we later encounter. But our cultural obsession with specialization pushes counter to that."There is a constant tension of the author's confidence in his conclusion that generalists are uniquely valuable and desperately needed and his recognition that he is fighting an almost Quixotic uphill battle against powerful cultural trends and incentives for specialization.What he means by specialization and the factors closely tied to it:1. Head Start: Encouraging children from an early age to narrowly pursue things they seem talented at or have an interest in.2. Domain-Specificity: Training with heavy emphasis on the specific narrow range skills we know we will need in the target environment and assuming far transfer of skills from other activities will be limited or non-existent.3. Disciplinary Focus: Viewing learning as consisting of accumulating facts and theories specific to a particular field or subfield of study in order to become highly skilled at working in that narrow field.4. Persistence: The idea that we should identify a passion early and stick with it no matter what because it’s what we’re good at and enjoy and so can become successful at it if we manage to persist.5. Fast and Efficient Short-Term Learning: The assumption that we are learning better when we feel familiar with the material quickly and that we are then learning more efficiently.Against those powerful and popular specialization factors, Epstein presents several compelling lines of evidence:1. Domain-Specificity varies with Kind vs. Wicked Learning: The argument for early specialization and domain-specificity is based on the observation that we need a long period of deliberate practice to accumulate the patterns and skills specific to performing in that specific activity and that practicing or exploring other activities is unlikely to do anything helpful for our performance in our specialty. Epstein counters that on closer inspection we find a crucial distinction between different kinds of domains and learning environments, where in some of them deliberate practice reliably makes us better but in others deliberate practice either helps much less or can even make us perform more poorly under some conditions. So not all domains or learning environments are equally specific and the head start is not equally helpful in all activities.2. Creative Performance comes from early exploration and interdisciplinary learning: Given the domain-specific view of expertise we tend to assume that in order for someone to perform at a high level in any activity, since they need expertise, they need to specialize in that activity. Epstein counters that when we focus specifically on creative performance, we find that deep expertise can be invaluable but is not enough. In order to come up with truly novel solutions to problems we need to make use of analogies that cross different domains while sharing deep structural similarities. That means being familiar with a wider range of ideas and ways of thinking than just those in our specialty, and so Epstein says creative performance is found more in people with broader backgrounds. Epstein argues that outstanding creative performance also tends to be associated with early exploration of different activities more than with early specialization.3. The Efficiency We Perceive from Narrow Immersion is Very Often Illusory: We tend to assume that when we feel more familiar with the activity or material that we are learning it. That’s part of the strong intuitive appeal for immersion in an activity comes from, it feels like we are learning more when we are more immersed. Epstein argues that the evidence from learning research show quite often exactly the opposite, that the learning we think we are doing under conditions of immersion is either much less or much shorter lived than we assume. Robert Bjork’s concept of “desirable difficulty” in learning and the evidence base behind it plays a central role in this argument. This, Epstein argues, tells us that “slow learning” which helps us make new connections between a wider range of experiences is much more conducive to learning in the long run than fast, efficient learning from immersion in a narrow subject matter.4. Match Quality is Not Necessarily the Same as Early Passion: Part of the argument for early specialization is based on the assumption that people have certain interests and talents from early on and if they can find something that matches them well and start early, they can align their passion with a successful career in that activity. Epstein argues that what we know about lifespan development tells us that people’s passions are not so fixed or narrow and finds a number of cases of exceptionally successful people who spent their lives exploring and trying different things before finding a match that was truly satisfying and successful for them.Range is an appeal to encourage exploration in our lives from early on and for experimenting and experiencing broadly in our learning, even though it may seem to be inefficient or slow. Epstein does not deny the immense value of long deliberate specialized practice in “kind” domains or the value of having deep specialized experience in some areas, but he has also made a passionate and well-argued case for making better use of a completely different dimension of performance. A dimension rooted in longer term developmental outcomes, more exploratory or playful learning, and an ongoing search for ever better matches between our interests and abilities and our activities.

I found Range to be an eye and mind opening book especially for those of us that were constantly tempted to follow an ever narrowing attitude towards knowledge, learning, perception as well as research. The book was written in a clear and accurate way that allows for knowledge to easily flow in while also offering a very pleasant read. The book is also very practical as it deals with many things we do every day throughout our life, and it helped me challenge my way of thinking on one hand while it also provided me with a new thinking and acting tool for right now and for the future. I recommend this book to all of us that were always fund of objectivity and didn’t have an accurate and practicable definition for it. Staying objective is difficult and this book is a very good companion for that task…

About halfway through and enjoying and putting in practice every part. Thank you!