Range

David Epstein’s Range argues that in the modern world it’s generalists who will succeed over specialists in a wide variety of situations.

There are a few narrow fields where early specialism may triumph. Easy learning environments where you get quick feedback on what went right or wrong. Things that have repeatable elements that you can reliably master. Chess, golf and playing certain instruments can all match these criteria, and we can all think of examples of people who specialised early and went on to be masters in the field.

However, wicked problems are not so tractable to the early specialisation. Things that take longer to see success or failure. Areas where novel thinking is required, or connecting multiple dots from different disciplines leads to success. In these areas, early specialisation can be harmful, the focus on mastery of a narrow area leads to solution blindness. Every problem is solved with a hammer, no matter if it’s a nail or not.

The book argues for early sampling before applying focus to attempt to achieve mastery. Most of the most successful people at even the repeatable problems try out a range of things before settling on the one that they connect most with, and that sampling time gives them confidence that they connect well with what they’ve settled on, and the grit to succeed.

It’s not the case that we don’t need specialists, they move forwards the state of the art, they go deep into problems and create something new. Generalists can span across these deep solutions, connect them in novel ways and bring to bear existing solutions from one domain, to solve a problem in a way a specialist would never be aware of.

Epstein also gives practical advice to make use of these generalist successes. Take the time to sample in an area. Support children who are doing so and don’t worry if they ‘fall behind’ early on, once they find fit they’ll accelerate ahead of the early strivers. Don’t get held up on grit to be successful, you need to want to be there before getting gritty matters.

Make use of existing tools. Learn from specialists and take the best of what they know to solve problems in your areas.

Create diverse groups to solve problems more effectively!

Range is a great book to look at what learning techniques and approaches work well in the wicked modern world, how we’ve fallen for some bad assumptions on specialisation and how we can balance the two to be more than the sum of our parts.