Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

My fav read this year by-far. Some notes I made while reading:

- Humans and machines aka centeaurs are the ultimate combos that will be spawned and dominate the planet.
-AI is good at tactics and pattern recognition although humans excel at strategy.
- Savants and prodigies are just pattern matchers and things that break their patterns completely fuck them up.
- Understanding when you're pattern matching is critical. Things like chess, golf and tennis are easy to become exceptional because you have clear, fast feedback loops with binary outcomes.
- Things like business are far more complex and are called wicked domains because they can reinforce the wrong lessons.
- The essence of success is finding your own voice and being authentic at the highest levels.
- Designing an organisation requires careful principles that promote flexibility and paradoxes from top to down.
- Remove your ego and take a higher order view of whatever you're doing of maximal results.

I worry about how much Epstein's writing appeals to me since it often feels like confirming biases and suspicions I already harbour. But if you've ever spent any time invested deeply in long-term development (sports, kids, yourself), so many of the topics covered in Range are likely real issues you've encountered. Do I specialize early, am I missing out by not committing down one path, should I even bother with some interest that isn't directly applicable to my work or field of study? There's a lot of pop psych about head-start approaches to development but not much which validates what you come to realize with age is still a valid and useful path to success: breadth and experimentation.

The next time some coach or trainer tells you how imperative early specialization is, this is the book that will help you feel more comfortable at dealing with a culture hellbent on being first rather than growing into skill and talent.

Really interesting readings: in a world of hyper specialisation, the author claims that problems can be solved easily when the solver has heterogenous experiences, using strong scientific evidence.

That happens because a part from some sports and disciplines, the world do not provide any direct and immediate feedback to our actions.

It made me reflect on the fact that society always pushes for single domain expertise, while young people should experiment as much as possibile, without the urge of “finishing their passion”

Highly suggested!

An absolutely amazing book - focuses on how learning and acquiring skills is more important than early specialization. Promotes sampling and experimentation. Not that it actively negates specialization, but says there are deep merits of gaining wide experience before you dive deep into something. I am convinced that early starts aren't well thought out. One of my favourite lines that resonate with me:

The question i set out to explore was how to capture and cultivate the power of breadth, diverse experience and interdisciplinary exploration within systems that increasingly demand hyperspecialization and would have you decide what you should be before first figuring out who you are.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren't you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, everyone started from a different place, everyone has struggles or obstacles that the world doesn't know about so don't let anyone make you feel behind. You probably don't even know exactly where you're going, so feeling behind doesn't help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments.

I ended up putting this one down about 30% of the way through. The author makes a great case for being a generalist, and presents various case studies to back up his point. What was missing for me was any connection to a call to action, or suggestions on how to include a generalist mindset/approach in daily life. In short - I think I got the point, and if the remainder of the book contains more case studies and nothing else, it won't add much to the experience for me.

This book puts forward an interesting hypothesis that is summarised by “generalists are better than specialists when it comes to innovation”. Steven Johnson sums this up in his book “Where good ideas come from”; “innovation occurs when ideas and people collide”. Well written and interesting stories but could have been summed up in 10% of the space.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I'll admit he was preaching to the choir. I've always defined creativity as nothing more than linking ideas across domains, so the wider your range of interests, the more potential for creativity. As a lifelong polymath obsessed with reading and researching things while working in a creative/technical field, this seems fairly obvious. So the biggest takeaway from this book was how much overspecialization is happening across industries. I've seen some of this in person (the medical field: haven't we all), but it's still concerning to think about in regards to, say, scientific research.

I think this quote from his conclusion really captures the essence of the book: “The question I set out to explore was how to capture and cultivate the power of breadth, diverse experience, and inter-disciplinary exploration, within systems that increasingly demand hyperspecialization, and would have you decide what you should be before first figuring out who you are.”

If you're not convinced, read this book. If you need encouragement that your interests unrelated to your work still matter, read this book. If you disagree with everything I just said, read this book and open your mind a little.

Be a “T” person: Have breadth, experiment with different topics/domains. Specialization is over rated and you do not need to feel falling behind when you do not specialize early in your career.
And here are some great examples and stories...

In summary, I loved the concept, some of the stories/examples are more interesting than others.

Three stars because it suffered from “I got something really interesting here that I can write a 3-5 page article about it but I will make a book out of it” syndrome, imho.

The 10000 hours myth about how only riguous training makes you an expert in a field, only applies to very narrow procedure-based fields (sports, musical instruments, chess, ..). The book presents how these qualify as “kind” learning environments, where the playing field is clearly staked out, the rules are rigid and the feedback is straightforward and quick. Yet most of our world and most modern-day problems lean towards “wicked” learning environments: Where the playing field might change from day to day, rules evolve and feedback is delayed or innacurate. Epstein shows how lateral thinking and interdiscplinarity (in people, and in teams) triumphs over specialication in these scenarios. A good approach is to find a balance between procedure-based training and abstract thinking. You still need specialists for specialists tasks, but you need generalists - who are good at abstract and lateral thinking - if you want to innovate your discipline. Creativity is the ability to change/improve one's discipline. Creativity comes from observing and dabbling in many different ideas and fields. Epstein says that nowadays there should be less need for specialists, because knowledge and information is shared widely. There's a higher need for generalists - “connectors” - to make use of and innovate on top of the available knowledge. Epsteins defines: Specialist ... as experts in very narrow fieldsGeneralist ... to have elementary knowledge in many different fields Polymath ... as generalists with one focus specialisationGreat popsci book, easy to read, and full of real-world examples. The first chapters about kind and wicked learning environments were novel to me, the rest of the book though, its praise of interdisciplinarity is rather similar to Steven Johnson's [b:Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation 8034188 Where Good Ideas Come from The Natural History of Innovation Steven Johnson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705993l/8034188.SY75.jpg 12645873].

I enjoyed the book. The topic, the research, the details felt like they'd been written for me. Read for an understanding of the other view, opposing the early and hyper specialisation that rules the current social and business structures.
Yet, it was a slow, sluggish read. Shorter by a third, and it'd have been a crisp 5* book. Now I'm struggling to choose between 3 and 4.

Find this review - and some more - on my website here.
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Started with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous “business-class” style case studies.

Main takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen's brilliant post on Anki (Augmenting Long-term Memory) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book. Interleaving is the technique of mixing up your learning in varied environments so that it makes some unusual connections that you'd normally won't think about - and might come in handy when you are faced with a problem in a new environment you haven't previously encountered.

In the end, “Range” suffers from the same deficiencies that a lot of other pop-psychology/self-management books suffer from - too many anecdotal evidence and case studies. A reviewer here on Goodreads summed it the best - “Finally, Range is designed to appeal to people who are already skeptical of specialization/ enthusiastic about generalized skillsets. I worry that some of the appreciation of this book is just a soothing exercise in confirmation bias for generalists.”

Still, I'd recommend it to people who (like me) are skeptical about their tendency to dabble in too many disparate fields at the same time - this might be the soothing pill that you were looking for.