This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.
ABOUT
- Title: Range
- Sub-title: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- Author: David Epstein
- About the author: In addition to Range, David Epstein also wrote the New York Times best seller The Sports Gene. He is a decorated writer who was previously a writer at Sports Illustrated and a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica. His writing has also been featured in a variety of organizations from disciplines such as science, engineering, medicine, and athletics. He has a master’s degree in environemental science and journalism.
- Pages: 352
- Published: 2019
- Link to book
HIGH-LEVEL SUMMARY
Range is a book that advocates for the generalists; the experimenters, the ones who are open-minded and willing to try many things. Author David Epstein studied the paths of success that the most accomplished athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters, and scientists took.
In today’s world, it seems like everyone is pushed to specialize as early as possible. Parents that want their kids to excel at a certain sport, activity, or musical instrument will put their kids in it at a young age. They’ll have them solely practice that activity through their childhood.
Epstein found that the most successful and innovative people actually followed a different path more often than not. These elite individuals tended to go through a “sampling period” where they tried a variety of things.
For an athlete, they may have played several sports growing up before settling on one and perfecting it. For a musician, they may have played several instruments before landing on one they loved and wanted to master.
Overall, Range will explain the dangers of overspecialization and how breadth can be valuable.
RECOMMENDATION
Range was incredibly insightful on pointing out the pros and cons of specialization vs. breadth.
I’d strongly recommend this to anyone for the benefit of their hobbies and/or profession. Understanding the benefits of sampling can help your overall improvement in learning and ability.
Many of the findings presented in the book are counterintuitive and I think everyone should be aware of them.
This book is great for business as well as parenting. If you are a parent or have friends and family that are younger than you, I believe the knowledge you’ll gain from this book can especially benefit them if you pass it on.
If you are a parent of a three-year-old, you may be at the stage of finding out what activities to put them in. What sports should they play? What instruments should they learn? What about art?
After reading Range, you’ll know that exposing your child to a variety of domains will likely benefit their overall development.
TOP 30 TAKEAWAYS
WHAT I LIKED
BENEFITS TO YOUR LIFE AND CAREER
12 ACTIONS YOU SHOULD TAKE
1. Sample a variety of activities, sports, careers, etc to learn about your own abilities and gain a range of proficiencies you can you can draw from.
2. Instead of jumping to specialize immediately, accumulate experience in different domains.
3. Stay open-minded about solutions that come from outside of your domain and expertise. Think of it as “having one foot outside your world.”
4. Identify if a task or skill uses a “kind” learning environment or if it is wicked. In a kind environment, pattern recognition works powerfully and there is immediate feedback. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable.
5. Practice Fermi questions to help develop abstract thinking and critical intelligence. A little training in broad thinking strategies, like Fermi-izing, can go a long way, and can be applied across domains.
6. Think of how you can apply current knowledge to new problems. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.
7. When you are learning, you want it to be hard. Do this through desirable difficulties: testing yourself, the generation effect, spaced repetition, interleaving of practice.
8. Practice analogical thinking. Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar.
9. Avoid the phenomenon of internal details. Imagine you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race. The more internal details you learn about any particular scenario—physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician—the more likely you are to say that the scenario you are investigating will occur.
10. Aim to find match quality in what you do. Seth Godwin has said that “winners” often quit fast and quit often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit. Godwin was not advocating that one quit simply because a pursuit is difficult. 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.
11. University of Utah professor Abbie Griffin studied “serial innovators.” Here were some traits found that you can strive to have: “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 multiple domains”; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.”
12. Learn how to “drop your tools.” Experienced groups became rigid under pressure and “regress to what they know best.” Doing what you know best can prevent you from finding new solutions. With overlearned behavior, you do the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that you no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool.
RESOURCES
Range can be found on Amazon at this link here if you are interested in reading.