Book Notes: Range by David Epstein

Compare Roger Federer and Tiger Woods - two of the planet's greatest athletes with two very different paths to greatness. Tiger, a child prodigy who appeared on TV at 2 years old is an easy case for early specialization. By his teens, he had become a force on the amateur circuit and after turning pro, became the youngest-ever number one ranked golfer at age 21. Federer, in contrast, played a variety of sports, only deciding to focus on tennis in his teens.

As it turn's out, Roger's path is more common than Tiger's - elite athletes typically spend time early on trying out lots of different sports in an unstructured way. They learn about themselves and their skills first and develop their technical chops later on.

And it's not just sports. Those who specialized early made more money immediately after college, but people who specialized later found careers that fit them better and had higher earnings than early specializers soon after.

In fact, some of the most highly specialized experts can even get worse with time while at the same time getting more confident. Highly specialized experts can sometimes suffer from "cognitive entrenchment," while exploring a range of different interests and skills lends itself to problem solving, creativity, and mental flexibility. This is why Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely to have a hobby like dancing, acting, music, woodworking, tinkering with electronics, or writing... a breadth of experiences.

In a rapidly changing world, important problems can have a dimension of "newness," unlike a chess game where a chess master might have seen the board's configuration before. In these situations, it is those who are able to creatively draw on a broad range of experiences that can solve the problem. Simply adding more hours of practice time doesn't help solve these sorts of problems.

Over these first 10 years of my career, I've had a variety of different jobs and experiences - I was an amateur sailboat racer, a personal trainer at LA Fitness (and quit the day before I was supposed to start), did a few rotations in the ER as an EMT, booked tours for musicians, and wrote software for fintech companies. My undergraduate degree is in sports medicine, and my graduate degree is in computer science. I sometimes worry whether I wasted those years because I don't usually see the immediate relevance to my job. I ask myself whether I would have been better off going straight into computer science from the get-go, knowing that this was what I'd be doing today. Range made me feel like a little bit less of a misfit in a field that idolizes the 24-year-old founder success story. Here's to the curious, the tinkerers, and the dabblers.

Highlights

"It appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them."

The correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero.

"sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality."

creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart.

Knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate conditions under which they should quit. The important trick, he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.

"We fail," he wrote, when we stick with "tasks we don't have the guts to quit."

"[The high-achieving professionals] never look around and say, 'Oh, I'm going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age.' ... They focused on, 'Here's who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here's what I've found I like to do, here's what I'd like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I'll switch because I'll find something better.' ... Short term planning ... They all practice it, not long-term planning."

"the further the problem was from the solver's expertise, the more likely they were to solve it."

"Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do."

[Abbie Griffin and the other authors of Serial Innovators] are concerned that HR policies at mature companies have such well-defined, specialized slots for employees that potential serial innovators will look like "round pegs to the square holes" and get screened out. Their breadth of interests do not neatly fit a rubric. They are "π-shaped people" who dive in and out of multiple specialties. "Look for wide-ranging interests," they advised. "Look for multiple hobbies and avocations"

Skillful forecasters depart from the problem at hand to consider completely unrelated events with structural commonalities rather than relying on intuition based on personal experience or a single area of expertise