The Power of Range
Growing up, I always looked to elite sports athletes for examples of success — simply because being the best in the world meant beating everyone else. Some of my favourites include esteemed footballer Lionel Messi, who has won the most Ballon D’Or awards in history (7, at the time of writing), and Haile Gebrselassie, considered by many to be the greatest distance runner of all time. Both of them share something in common — starting out in their respective sports from a young age. Messi started playing club football at age 4, while Gebrselassie had to run 10 kilometres to school and back home every single day as a young kid (his running gait is distinct due to the weight of the books on his left hand).
This concept of having complete mastery at something is concretised further in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Spend 10,000 hours of deep practice on a particular skill and you will almost certainly become world class at it. Stars like Messi and Gebrselassie had the privilege of starting out real early, therefore clocking their 10,000 hours way before many others did.
My personal experiences in Singapore reinforced this idea too. Numerous student athletes start training regularly from a young age of 7, the first year we enter compulsory schooling. Many hoped to utilise their sporting prowess to get a placement in more prestigious schools in Singapore.
In secondary school (for students aged 13–16/17), it’s frowned upon to change our co-curricular activities (also known as CCAs, which are basically clubs, sport groups and the like outside of regular school hours) just because we think that the one that we currently are in doesn’t fit. Students have to go through tons of administrative paperwork, and come up with a good reason to switch their CCAs. Simply saying “this isn’t for me” wouldn’t cut it.
However, I recently stumbled across Range by David Epstein, which pushed me to challenge my long held belief that specialisation and spending huge amounts of time on one particular skill was truly worth it. Having an extremely broad range of interests beyond the normal realms of school work and students’ one co-curricular activity would be highly unusual by conventional standards.
As I delved deeper into the book, new questions and insights started to trickle in. I realised the road to success is paved with more nuances and subtleties — it is more than just 10,000 hours of practice on a single skill. Moreover, is specialisation applicable to me as a student?
The changing context and the times that we are growing up in no longer allows us to succeed merely through specialisation. In a world increasingly surrounded by artificial intelligence, narrow mastery of a particular skill set may no longer be the most relevant. Even a human’s complete dominance in an “intuitive” game like Go no longer means that we’re the best at it. According to Gary Marcus, an established author in the field of AI, “AI systems are like savants” — they are starting to become, and will continue to be, the best at the specific tasks that they are doing. As technology progresses, we might just see a world of specialist robots and generalist humans.
How then, do generalists succeed in the real world? One example that particularly stood out was Innocentive, a crowd-sourcing company, which offers cash bounties for amateurs who have a unique combination of experiences that allow them to solve problems that even specialists are unable to.
There was also a stark reminder that overspecialisation to achieve superior grades did nothing to increase critical thinking ability. In a study conducted by James Flynn, a renowned intelligence researcher, he found that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was zero.
The path of singular excellence, that is held in such high regard within society, trades flexibility for a narrow skill. Having flexibility and open-mindedness to experiment with novel concepts is increasingly more important. It is the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn, applying different concepts across multiple fields of study that would most likely guarantee success in this day and age.
To become a modern polymath like Elon Musk, goes way beyond spending 10 years on a specific domain. He trained himself in software engineering and finance during his early days at Paypal. Subsequently, he gained a broad understanding of rocket science and the EV industry in order to lead humanity to the next generation of technology and science, via SpaceX and Tesla respectively. The versatility to learn across domains, and the ability to ideate solutions using inter-domain concepts is vital to Musk’s success. 10,000 hours is an oversimplification of the path to success — it may make you the next Usain Bolt, but not the next Elon Musk.
As Scott Adams aptly put it, if we want to be extraordinary in life, we all have two paths:
- Become the best at one specific thing OR
- Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
In my opinion, the lack of exploratory interest and the crippling fear of failure is partly due to the education system that I live in¹. When students over-optimise to attempt to be the best in one particular area (option 1) and fail, the most normal response might be to “try harder”, without considering the option of switching fields or combining skill sets (option 2). This runs completely against what is truly needed for success in the future — what we need are “anti-fragile” polymaths who are willing to build, fail and iterate — taking the risk to stray off the well-beaten path and venture into the unknown.
How can an education system foster an environment of exploration? A great starting point would be to encourage students to look past their school curriculum into extensions and applications in the real-world. Various subject teachers could also collaborate with one another to consolidate students’ knowledge, getting them to apply concepts learnt in different subjects to interdisciplinary case studies. Sometimes, it might just take any teacher to play a short YouTube video at the start or end of class to pique students’ curiosity, and expose them to a broader range of possibilities.
Sometimes, building up new interests and looking forward to controlled failure could be simply exploring and then choosing to dive deep into an area that you might never have come across before. Acquiring specific information across domains could never have been easier — just search on YouTube for any videos pertaining to the domain that you may be interested in! Here’s a channel that I recommend. All it takes is the willingness to try something new.
[1]: In the OECD’s 2019 PISA test, Singapore had the highest percentage of students who struggled with failure. In a system known for its academic rigour, students are pushed to excel in studies. 76% of students in Singapore reported feeling very anxious for a test even if they were well prepared, compared to the OECD average of 55%.
