Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, shortlisted for the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award.

From the ‘10,000 hours rule’ to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialisation and many hours of deliberate practice. And, worse, that if you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong.

In Range, David Epstein demonstrates why, as the world has become increasingly complex, developing range can help us excel by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly and juggling many interests.

Studying the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, and scientists Epstein discovered that in most fields – especially those that are complex and unpredictable – generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. They are also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see. Range proves that by spreading your knowledge across multiple domains is the key to success rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area.

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, reviewed

This is an interesting book, with a powerful counter argument to Malcom Gladwell’s thesis that you need 10,000 hours of practice to be good at something. Beginning in the world of sport, but then soon veering into Nobel Prize science winners, this book offers up a healthy antidote and call to arms about the dangers of over specialisation and focussing on too narrow a range of study.

Who would have thought the German 2014 World Cup Winning football team would have been mentioned too. Apparently this squad had a disproportionately high number of players who didn’t solely play football all their lives, but had actually enriched their sporting vocabulary by engaging in many other sports before focussing on a professional career in football.

When you consider how well they played, and in a fluid, wide range of attacking options way it probably makes sense. Especially when you contrast it with the historically leaden performances by the English football team (circa 2006 – 2014) who were truly turgid and tough to watch, potentially as a result of having been over coached.

Epstein phrases the concept around Roger vs Tiger, in that while Tiger Woods, and the Polgar chess playing sisters were coached by parents with a point to prove from such an early age that it predated their own conscious desires to actually play that particular sport/activity. While in the Woods & Polgar cases the children did achieve global success, Epstein successfully explains that this only works for very finite, specific tasks.

Much like the AIs such as Alpha Go that can beat the best human players in the world, but will never make you a decent cup of tea, or solve any other problems that fall outside of their narrow range of excellence, so too for humans as well, over specialism is not a desirable quality.

Interestingly too Epstein also cites many recent Nobel prize winners who regularly declared ‘this is wonderful, but it would not be possible now’ as they reflected on their own, non linear career path that brought them, finally, to their ultimate epic breakthrough.

The ability to play, to be curious, to achieve IgNobel results (amazing inventions with no clear useful purpose) is vital, and often leads to breakthroughs and insights many decades after the initial insight was achieved. None of which would have been possible if the person in question had been forced to stick with their original chosen career path.

Epstein’s book is an important call to arms, with interesting ideas for us to consider, evaluate, and work out how on earth we manage to find the right balance between becoming subject matter experts, while also remaining open minded enough to bring in wisdom and insights from other disciplines which may then deliver the missing piece in that particular puzzle.

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