Home > Work > Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
1 " mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated "
― David Epstein , Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
2 " If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly. "
3 " an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues. "
― David Epstein, , Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
4 " Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. "
5 " We learn who we are only by living, and not before. "
6 " We learn who we are only by living and not before. "
7 " We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. "
8 " You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning. "
9 " 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. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible. "
10 " The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization "
11 " Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures. "
12 " Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit. "
13 " The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.* "
14 " Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one. "
15 " The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been. That feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented. "
16 " everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines. "
17 " Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. "
18 " In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous. "
19 " breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity. "
20 " The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. "
