To Specialise, or Not to Specialise
Book Review: Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
Stories of child prodigies are compelling, as is the 10,000-hour Rule: enough practice, Malcolm Gladwell argued, and anyone can master any skill. We applaud the focus and dedication of these superhumans, but it can leave those of who us who can’t lay claim to such single-minded commitment feeling like under-achievers. If you’re more of a generalist, if you try out lots of different sports or even careers, you can’t expect real success in any of them, right?
Wrong.
Drawing in stories from many different fields — sports, science, education, art, the military — Epstein shows a consistent principle at work: those who can draw on a broad base of experience, who can make connections outside the specialization of their field, are consistently those who solve the world’s most wicked problems.
Child prodigies may excel in skills such as golf, chess or music, but in the messy real world, full of ‘wicked problems’, over-familiarity, repetition and pattern-matching can only take you so far, and sometimes it can be disastrous: Epstein gives the graphic example of experienced firefighters dying in a forest fire because when things went unexpectedly wrong it simply didn’t occur to them to drop the 100lb-plus of tools they carry so they could run away more quickly. They saw their tools as essential to their usual fire-fighting routing, and they couldn’t drop the tools of their expertise even when they were clearly not serving them. It’s a powerful metaphor for a cognitive limitation that afflicts most specialists facing a wicked problem.
He makes an important point about creativity, one of the most highly-valued skills in a disrupted world, as machines become more capable of taking on routine tasks. Creativity consists of making new connections, and to make a new connection requires experience beyond the domain at hand:
‘Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.’
He also has good news for anyone who’s ever quit — a course, a career, a relationship: sometimes, he argues, quitting is the absolutely right thing to do as you accumulate more data about yourself. The ‘Never give up’ mantra has merit, but it can also blight lives: it may well be that in giving up one path for another, the lessons you take with you become your superpower.
One point Epstein doesn’t make explicitly is the case for the value of the humanities in a world that currently values ‘hard’ subjects, those that can be immediately and obviously linked to profitable outcomes, even though research consistently shows that schools that prioritise ‘soft’ subjects like music and art see improved results across the curriculum as well as better engagement and social skills. I hope educational policy makers are reading and taking note.
It’s a well-written book packed with engrossing (if occasionally over-worked) stories and making an important and timely point. It does occasionally feel as though the focus is more on the stories and less on the point, but that’s a minor irritation. Perhaps a more fundamental problem is that he fails to address the elephant in the room: for every brilliant unlikely connection there are thousands of unhelpful ones. A bit more guidance on maximising the chance of finding the useful connection up front rather than simply recognising it in hindsight would have been welcome…
Range is available from Blackwell’s here.
Alison Jones (@bookstothesky) is a publishing partner for businesses and organizations with something to say. Formerly Director of Innovation Strategy with Palgrave Macmillan, she hosts The Extraordinary Business Book Clubpodcast, regularly speaks and blogs on publishing, business and writing, sits on the board of the IPG, and is the author of This Book Means Business (2018).
