Book Summary: Range
Range by David Epstein (2019)
Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
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Conventional wisdom believes if you want to excel in your field, start early, specialize, and practice regularly. You’ve heard of the 10,000-hour rule of deliberate practice that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in Outliers? The rule claims that a person must spend 10,000 hours practicing a specific task to master playing the violin, running a sub-four-minute mile, or other skills. Epstein’s book turns this assertion on its head.
Early specialization is effective when activities have clear rules and players can detect patterns such as when playing chess and firefighting. Epstein calls this learning in “kind environments.” Participants excel in situations where they can practice intently, and therefore, predict what will happen next based on their previous experiences. Artificial Intelligence also excels in an environment where we know the rules and answers and they don’t change over time. These kind environments make for a tidy and comforting world.
But what about mastering the chaotic, real world? Situations in which the rules aren’t known and patterns don’t emerge. Situations such as answering questions like how many drops of water there are in Lake Michigan. “Wicked environments” aren’t a good environment for early specialization. A deliberate practice focused on correcting errors doesn’t work well. In kind environments where everyone knows the rules and procedures, teams of specialists (think highly trained surgical teams) work together smoothly and make fewer mistakes. In the wicked world where the path is unclear, some tools will work well in certain circumstances and not in others. Our rapidly changing, wicked world demands conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
You can apply the lessons from this book to developing your own personal and professional skills, helping to develop your employees, as well as deciding how to raise your kids. It also has policy implications related to designing curriculum and what we measure -- and therefore, value -- in our education system.
Epstein emphasizes that there is nothing inherently wrong with specialization. Einstein was a specialist, after all. But the range of training predicts the range of knowledge transfer: the more settings in which a person learns something, the more s/he creates abstract models in her/his own thinking, and the less likely s/he will be to rely on any one example or pattern. In other words, learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the crux of creativity and creative problem solving.
Elite performers in multiple fields start broad, specialize later, and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. Notable examples include Charles Darwin, Duke Ellington, Frances Hesselbein, and Roger Federer. Skill development and career advancement is rarely a linear path from A to B. It’s full of experimentation, mistakes, detours, and range. The best learning is slow and distributed. It requires a person to explore across disciplines. A person is better served by testing and learning rather than planning and implementing because we learn faster and more effectively through practice over theory.
A person who specializes later is also more likely to achieve a higher match quality, or the term that economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone performs and their abilities and preferences. People who seek a high match quality don’t worry about whether they are falling behind others pursuing a more linear career path. Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. It’s more complicated to grow breadth.
Epstein concludes with recommendations about applying some of the lessons he discussed in the book. “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, hyper specialization.” He advocates taking an adequate sampling and exploration period like Roger Federer did. (Federer played a number of sports until he was 20, when he decided to focus on tennis. Conversely, Tiger Woods picked up a golf club when he was two and never put it down). As you or your children explore during a sampling and experimentation period, don’t feel behind compared to others. It’s your own personal journey during which you should be willing to learn and adjust as you go, even to change directions dramatically. It’s okay that you may not know yet where you are going.