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Key insights from
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a
Specialized World
By
David Epstein
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What you’ll learn
Our culture specializes in specialization. But despite
popular messaging and our obsession with efficiency, the modern world is
not safe for specialists. It is the generalist who will thrive in a world
that is unpredictable.
Read on for key insights from Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
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1. Experience
doesn’t matter much if a small disruption of the status quo undermines it.
How beneficial is experience? It depends on the domain.
In activities like chess or golf, events occur within a predictable
framework. In chess, bishops only move diagonally, rooks only move
vertically or horizontally, and all pieces move on an eight-by-eight grid.
Chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov says he can see a pattern with every move
that his opponent makes. He’s seen comparable combinations thousands of
times before. In golf, you always hit a small ball with metallic rods of
varying weight and girth, and the golfer always hits the ball short, wide,
far, or on the mark.
But what would happen if golfers were suddenly expected to
hit bowling balls or pawns could slide around the board as effortlessly as
the queen? Everything that these experts had learned, the skills
they’d spent their lives honing and agonizing over, would be useless.
Unfortunately, the messaging in the media does not take this
into account. The moral of stories like Tiger Woods and chess grandmasters
is that, “If you work hard enough, you can do it, too! And whatever you may
love, even if it isn’t chess or golf, you can accomplish comparable feats
if you are precocious and tenacious enough!”
But there’s an important distinction to be made between
different kinds of activities: there are “kind games” and then there are “wicked
games.” In kind games, the rules and expectations remain relatively
constant. Variation is great only within a very narrow range of acceptable
actions. Chess and golf are kind games. Firefighters and accountants also
play kind games, and this shows when something suddenly falls outside the
scope of the experience. What happens when a fire chief who can competently
give orders for two-story houses gets a call about a skyscraper on fire?
Seasoned accountants who are given new tax laws to integrate into their
process tend to do worse than amateur accountants.
There are kind games, and then there are wicked games. In
wicked games, the rules are incomplete, imprecise, or subject to change.
The feedback is not statistically predictable. Experience can end up
reinforcing the wrong lessons. A status quo altered just slightly can
topple the specialist’s “expertise.” Rice University professor Erik Dane
refers to this as “cognitive entrenchment.” Using golf and chess as analogs
for life more generally is a comforting thought because it contains the
neatness and simplicity of a kind-game learning environment—but that’s not
the world we live in. Real life is much more of a “wicked game.”
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2. Never have
people been so capable of abstraction and connecting dots—specialization
fails to make the most of it.
Psychologist Robin Hogarth developed the distinction of
“kind” and “wicked” learning environments. Kind environments, like gold and
chess, operate with tremendous statistical regularity. Each game is
different, but the games are conducted within predictable, well-defined
parameters. Wicked learning environments lack the predictability, because
the rules can be unclear, incomplete, and mutable. The world we live in
has, in this sense, become increasingly wicked. But how did the world
become so?
In 1981, a New Zealander named James Flynn discovered a
remarkable phenomenon that changed psychology forever. The Flynn Effect, as
it came to be known, is the well-documented phenomenon of IQ rising by
about three points every decade of the twentieth century. This occurrence
is not unique to a particular country or continent. The results have been
consistent in the 30 countries where it’s been tested: particularly the
ability to abstract has improved dramatically. Someone today with an
average IQ would be in the 98th percentile 100 years ago.
The Ebbinghaus Illusion suffuses another example of the
change that modernity has brought to society’s thinking. This illusion
consists of two congruent circles, each surrounded by circles arranged in a
circular pattern. The circle on the left is surrounded by a ring of circles
larger than itself. A ring of circles also surrounds the second circle, to
the right, but the surrounding circles are smaller and closer to the circle
at the center. When asked which of the two center circles was bigger,
subjects from a modern industrialized background almost always think the
circle on the right, surrounded by smaller circles is bigger. What’s
remarkable is that when the same pictures are shown to people in remote
villages, they are able to tell that the two center circles are exactly the
same size.
It seems that people who are touched by modernity are more
apt to consider holistic contexts and develop abstract categories.
Premoderns see the trees. Moderns see a forest. Even in remote regions of
the world, researchers found that people who had some kind of exposure to
modern institutions were able to conceive of the world in more abstract
terms. They weren’t entirely tied to the concrete for knowledge of the
world.
We have failed to realize just how comfortable we’ve become
with abstraction or what a gift it is. For instance, take the word
“percent.” The word was used in almost zero percent of the literature
we have from the year 1900. But a century later, every 5,000th word was
“percent,” and it’s a concept that most people comfortably grasp. We think
in terms of such concepts, and can even hold multiple layers of concepts
together. It helps us handle complexity more competently and has made us
more flexible—if only we would make the most of it!
There’s no need to make a judgment as to whether the
premodern or modern skill set is better. As one Arab sociologist observed,
a city dweller attempting to traverse a desert would be utterly dependent
upon a nomad. In such a setting, it is the nomad who is the genius. But in
the modern world, a different skill set is required. Villagers learn from
experience, but they cannot learn without experience at the base. We don’t
have that luxury in a wicked world that is in constant flux. We have to
learn without experience. Kind learning environments like the chessboard or
a golf green simply aren’t representative of what we encounter in our
lives.
Can we connect new ideas and maneuver comfortably between
different contexts? The more statistically predictable and repetitive a
task, the more likely it is to become automated. This is true of not just
blue collar work, as theorists used to predict. Plenty of white collar jobs
are also vulnerable to a machine’s breathtaking efficiency. It is people
capable of exercising the kind of creativity and insight that machines
can’t replicate who will thrive in a wicked world.
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3. Make sure you
flirt with your possible selves before overcommitting to a particular
trajectory.
The world of specialization assumes that it’s vital to get a
head start and specify early. But there are plenty of people who take
circuitous paths to the vocation where they find greatest success and
fulfillment.
Grit isn’t everything. There’s something to be said for
sticking with a task, but dropping one undertaking in pursuit of
something more captivating isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Alice
Duckworth, a UPenn social psychologist and author of the bestseller Grit,
found that West Point’s method of predicting who would graduate and who
would quit during boot camp was ineffective. But her questionnaire about
grit, a combination of passion and perseverance, anticipated who would make
it more accurately.
But here’s the problem with the grit model: the underlying
assumption is that the West Point students who dropped out were deficient,
that the gritty cadets were the successful ones and the quitters were
not—or at least less so. But this is not necessarily the case. Maybe those
who quit West Point’s boot camp were not cut out for military-style
discipline, but that doesn’t mean they will be less successful either.
There is value to perseverance, but there’s also tremendous value to taking
a more meandering road, being willing to experiment in different fields,
and being ready to drop something if it doesn’t “click.”
Charles Darwin quit halfway through medical school, and was
going to default to becoming a clergyman, but took a gap year of sorts when
he joined the expedition aboard the Americas-bound HMS Beagle. It was a
decision that led to his becoming one of the most influential scientists of
all time. Michael Crichton made it through medical school at Harvard, but
he decided he didn’t want to be a doctor shortly after graduating. His
exposure to the medical world, however, was far from wasted: He became a
writer, and his medical background inspired bestselling novels like Jurassic
Park and his screenwriting for the wildly successful television drama
series ER.
Flirt with your possible selves. Try them on and see how
they fit. There’s no need to lock yourself into a path and see it through
to the end, especially if it no longer fits you well or makes you come
alive. Career choices which seem to be a perfect fit at the time may
eventually seem crazy in the light of further experiences.
Neurologist Ogi Ogas at Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Education
Program says that most people commit to the “standardized covenant,” the
deep-seated cultural assumption that the most rational thing to do is
follow a clear career path, and the earlier the better. What she found as
she researched people who were fulfilled and successful in their fields,
was that not just a handful, but almost every person interviewed
had taken a roundabout journey to the career where they fit best. What is
more, they felt some chagrin as they detailed the frequent leaps they made
over the years. They felt their path had been unconventional, that they were
dark horses of sorts. But here’s the truth: that’s how it happens for the
majority of the successful and fulfilled.
Studies reveal people’s tendency to believe they have
changed a great deal over the past decade, but they will not likely change
much more now. We’re works in progress claiming to be completed.
Psychologist Dan Gilbert describes this as “the end of history illusion.”
The fact is that we change plenty—and not just through our twenties, but
throughout our lives, often quite suddenly.
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4. Generalists are
often better than so-called experts at predicting the future.
A twenty-year study has shown that short- and long-term
“expert” predictions were often horribly inaccurate. The researcher who
spearheaded the project was a psychologist and political scientist named
Philip Tetlock. After observing experts insisting on diametrically opposed
viewpoints, he collected a variety of forecasts from almost 300
scholars—most of whom had PhDs. The predictions covered topics as diverse
as economics and international relations. Telock accrued about 82,000
predictions, and the results revealed that we live in a pretty wicked
world.
For all their relevant experience, degrees, accolades, and
even access to pertinent classified documents, the experts were usually
abysmal at predicting outcomes. This led Tetlock to test whether
generalists fared better than specialists at forecasting. Borrowing the
language of philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Tetlock distinguished between
hedgehogs (the “experts” who bore deeply into one specific subject) and
foxes (the integrators who know a lot of smaller things), pitting them
against each other to see which group made more accurate predictions. In
what became known as the Good Judgment Project, he recruited a team of
foxes (bright volunteers with wide-ranging interests and reading
preferences, but not experts in relevant fields) to see if they could
forecast better than teams of hedgehogs tucked away in ivory towers.
At forecasting competitions, teams of foxes demolished their
hedgehog competition. The margins of victory were embarrassingly
large—about 30 percent more accurate. Smart volunteers from the general
public did better than trained intelligence analysts.
Hedgehogs obsessively worked towards a solution, but their
constructions of the problem were often poorly defined. Outcomes were not
important for hedgehogs; whatever the results of experiments, they would
downplay inaccurate forecasts and exalt when their predictions were
correct. Their long-term predictions were especially wide of the mark.
Their predictions actually became less accurate the more degrees
and accolades they’d collected. Here again, experience appears to be
overrated, as too much of it in a specific area hinders many people from
honestly admitting their ideas have been proven wrong. Hedgehogs
tended not to adjust their views much in the face of compelling
counterevidence. Some even tweaked their views the wrong way, doubling down
on their misguided beliefs.
In contrast to the hedgehogs, the foxes were much more likely
to adjust their beliefs in the face of evidence to the
contrary. The best judges and predictors were the ones who would honestly
update their views. Some might refer to this process as “learning.” There
are unexpected perks to being an outsider. It seems the outsider is often a
better learner and more adaptable than an expert.
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5. In a wicked
world, the deliberate amateur—not the hyperspecialist with a head start—is
king.
We live in a culture that worships efficiency. This has led
us to assume that hyperspecialization is the way to go. We look for the
most efficient path and try to pursue it. It’s a well-intentioned,
understandable urge, but we need to cultivate inefficiency, too.
Pushing boundaries and trying new things means probing, and
probing is necessarily an inefficient process. Commit to being a deliberate
amateur, and your posture will become that of a learner. This will free you
up to dabble and quickly pivot as you need to.
Historian Arnold Toynbee reminds us that there’s no master
key that unlocks all doors. The more keys you have, the more likely you are
to find hidden connections between domains that experts are missing.
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