Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Is early specialization the key to success like how Tiger Woods started playing golf early or is late specialization better for the modern world where we sample a variety of interests and hobbies before honing in on one area that suits our abilities? This question is clearly answered in the book, Range by David Epstein who draws from a lot of scientific data and examples to argue that generalist or late specializes stand a higher chance of succeeding in rapidly changing world than early specializers. Below are some of the insights I gathered while reading this book.

Core Message

“Rather than obsessively focusing on a narrow topic, creative achievers tend to have broad interests. This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.” - Dean Keith

Sampling a variety of interests and experimenting with ideas early on in life is one of the keys to success in life. This will enable one to draw from a large pool of information, enabling one to come up with unique solutions that the modern man faces. 

The Danger of a Head Start

The problem with early specialization is that when you encounter unfamiliar problem, your years of specialized training will let you down. This is because you have been training to see certain patterns and if you see them, you know the solution on the spot.

Just like Mike Tyson said, Everyone has a plan till they got knocked in the face. We should seek breadth instead of depth early on in our career. Knowing too much of something to the point of mastery can be a disadvantage as it limits our perspective. This narrow approach to tackling problems can only work for so long. To tackle the new and unpredictable problems emerging everyday, we need to draw from a lot of pools of expertise and come up with a unique solution. Life is a marathon and not a sprint so we should take our time seeing what works and what doesn't.

Narrow specialization is death

"When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly—like the expert firefighters who suddenly make poor choices when faced with a fire in an unfamiliar structure." - D. Epstein, pg 38

Can you solve a problem without having any experience in the field? From research, specialists who face new problem they have never experienced before, fail miserably. They have been taught to tackle problems they have experience but never to tackle problems without experience.

When children are growing up, it highly important they under a sampling period. This is when the child experiments with a lot of things be it multiple music instruments, multiple sports, hobbies etc. This will enable to develop breadth thinking and will in future, have the capacity to draw from many pools of expertise.

Life is not constant

Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. - D. Epstein, pg 154

Life is everchanging

What you wanted to be when you were a child and what you want now are usually different things. This means that if you narrowly select a career before you experience what the world has to offer, you will be boxing yourself in and you will be like a bird in a cage who has little room to grow. We have to accommodate the changes in life and in our career which means we have to be flexible. Generalists are flexible and can adapt to the times if need be. They can easily switch careers without hesitation. Specialists especially early ones, are usually trapped in a given area as that is all they know and if it goes south, they cannot do anything else.

Learning on the fly

Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training - D. Epstein, pg 98

When learning new things, we should add spaced repetitions to the learning. This is where you test yourself without any hints after a given period of time. This will force you to remember and by doing so, you're telling the brain that what you're learning is important and over time, the information is stored in the long term memory and not short term.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please let me know in the comment section below.

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