Book Review: Range by David Epstein

1. Tiger’s (Tiger Woods) incredible upbringing has been at the heart of a batch of bestselling books on the development of expertise, one of which was a parenting manual written by Tiger’s father, Earl.

2. 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.

3. When scientists examine the entire developmental path of athletes, from early childhood, it looks like this: Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

4. One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.

5. Many studies have showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed.

6. An internationally renowned scientist told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.

7. 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.

8. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. There are domains beyond chess in which massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition.

9. 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. When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly.

10. Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction.

11. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.

12. Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’”

13. Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.” “Even the best universities aren’t developing critical intelligence,” he told me. “They aren’t giving students the tools to analyze the modern world, except in their area of specialization. Their education is too narrow.”

14. 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.

15. The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training. Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer.

16. The psychologists highlighted the variety of paths to excellence, but the most common was a sampling period, often lightly structured with some lessons and a breadth of instruments and activities, followed only later by a narrowing of focus, increased structure, and an explosion of practice volume.

17. Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.

18. Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Used for learning, testing, including self-testing, is a very desirable difficulty.

19. Another important desirable difficulty: “spacing,” or distributed practice. It is what it sounds like—leaving time between practice sessions for the same material. Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning. Interleaving is a desirable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills.

20. Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts.

21. Nike cofounder Phil Knight: “I feel sorry for the people who know exactly what they’re going to do from the time they’re sophomores in high school.” 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. “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.

22. Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts.

23. Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives.“ Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities.

24. “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.” The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information—undiscovered public knowledge, The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge.

25. Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses.

26. Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient.

27. 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. In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance.

28. “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.

29. In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over.

30. 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.