Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

The core premise here is that innovation often comes from applying old ideas in new ways. Whether tools are physical or mental, having a variety of tools in your toolkit allows you to approach problems more different ways. Epstein uses historical examples of groundbreaking ideas born from familiar concepts in one field being transferred to another to solve a big problem, examples where hyper-focused ideologies led to disaster, and various pieces of scientific evidence to support the premise that, while we need subject matter experts, we also need well rounded thinkers who can think abstractly about problems and apply old ideas in new ways.

While he critiques the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, I feel the presentation of the research behind it is caught in the crossfire. Gladwell's presentation is a problem, but at times the way he presents critiques of that presentation are overly critical of the research. He could have acknowledged that in Peak, Ericsson isn't advocating putting your kid in a room with a violin 20 hours a day. He addresses that highly specialized skills don't transfer unless they can be integrated into your existing mental models. He emphasizes that a core element of deliberate practice is being able to maintain a high level of focus throughout, and that repetition without the focus isn't going to be that helpful. He doesn't advocate anything like just abandoning everything else to train one skill.


Ultimately I don't think they're that far apart. They're both selling the message that you can improve at things you want to improve at, and that it's never too late to start learning. It did sour me a little to see how he presented Anders work, but I think both works can be used to inform your efforts at self improvement. I highly encourage both.

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.

Contender for one of my best reads of 2024. The book could be slightly shorter but it reads very quickly nonetheless. “A jack of all trades is a master of one, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” Oh how true this is. The absolute volume of people who made earth shattering discoveries is underserved by modern society and makes it seem like few exist when, in fact, a lot of different research, organizations, and people have discovered that generalization is the key to progress. Whether in sports, arts, or science or anything in between.

Gave me a new perspective; which is the primary reason why we should read a book.

One sentence summary: Be a generalist, because in this era when all information can be easily retrieved from the internet, being a specialist is not that beneficial anymore.

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.

Key takeaways:

- Surround yourself with people who have broad experience and differing views
- A wide scope of knowledge and experience is immensely beneficial
- Start with a wide range, narrowing it as you progress.

While I did find the overall message and studies (though interesting) to get very repetitive towards the end of the book I would still recommend this to anyone interested in the link between specialism, growth and curiosity. A lot of the examples are framed in scientific or research based environments but even so it paints a clear image of how breadth of interest can have an impact.

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.

The author aims to illustrate why you should be a polymath in this accessible world and what benefits you will gain from it, even if you are exceptional at one thing. Generalization widens your scope and gives you a greater capacity for adapting to new situations considering the highly fluctuating world.

So go get out and explore those things you don't think are important!
And make sure to make as many metaphors as you can.

Highly illuminating

I didn't think much of this book initially. I found out about this from a friend and the topic intrigued me but didn't interest me enough to read. I did read it and I am glad I did.

This book explains–with lots of powerful examples–something that I couldn't point to or express clearly. I have not cared significantly about specializing or generalizing mainly because generalizing has not been a sought-after activity anyway. It just has existed as an activity that describes “not specializing”. This book gives us this tool, this word, that makes not specializing a deliberate act. And that is the reason this book is so impactful.

Read this book. I feel the stories sometimes stretch intolerably but I feel glad having understood the stories deeply, as much as you can from words on a screen.

tl;dr from closing of the book: “Don't feel behind”

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!

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.

Quite brilliant in that it takes what most consider self-evident: early specialization and focused training is what builds world-beating athletes and professionals, and turns it on its head. Epstein writes that for every story of a Tiger Woods, earliest and continued focus on a particular sport, profession, or pasttime, there is another story that shows the opposite, namely early and ongoing experimentation. Roger Federer and the 2014 Germany world cup team are two useful examples. Early and exclusive specialization are seen as detrimental when dealing with novel situations in “wicked” domains that do not maintain the same rules (unlike chess and golf, many or most situations in emerging industries or medical research need different skills to draw on). The power of analogies is brought to the fore. For those who are switching careers, know that this is very common and studies on countries which require early college specialization (such as Britain) vs. those that encourage or require a breadth of experience (such as Scotland) show that breadth outweighs depth in terms of an economic strategy. This applies as much to education, as athletics, as music and other arts. Van Gogh is another striking example of massive exploration and experimentation which led to tremendous breakthrough. Charles Darwin's chaotic and diverse interests before the post-college gap year on the Beagle is another fascinating and thunderous example. Bill Gates enjoyed this book and it is in his Gates' Notes book list. One can hear a somewhat discordant note though, as he doesn't advise people who are interested in a specialization to not “go for it” say in microbiology, but he nevertheless attributes early and ongoing success at Microsoft on having a range of expertise and he says that those who thought the broadest also thought the deepest and were the most interesting and engaging.

While the ideas have great value, presentation in this book felt a bit difficult to read at times. Some stories are hard to follow, as the language is unnecessarily complex, and lots of stories go on the same formula - a year, a place, a person. Some small progression, then something more or less unexpected happens, then things change for the better. The importance of breadth in knowledge is well highlighted. It sheds some light on a few common misconceptions about specialization. It helps you understand how too much specialization can narrow your mind and not help in new challenges. How it is useful to be equipped with depth in kind, fixed environments, but how in most chaotic and complex games, breadth might be more valuable.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.