Why this Book: Strongly recommended by my friend Jay Hennessey and also a selection by the Next Big Idea Club to which I belong.  After Jay recommended it, I realized the NBI club had already sent me a copy – a sufficient confluence of events (synchronicity) to get me started. Glad I did.

Summary in 3 Sentences: SO many big ideas in this book, but the main point is that in order to make the best decisions in any context, one needs a broad range of experience, including experience OUTSIDE the specific problem area one is considering.  Epstein doesn’t dismiss specialists, but insists that specialists need to get out of their specialty for at least  two reasons: First, to best apply their specialist knowledge to the broader world, and second, to learn from the broader world lessons that may apply to their area of specialty.  He also provides insights from this theme against specializing early – he recommends playing the field and trying several possibilities before deciding on a life’s profession.

My Impressions:  One of the most interesting and insightful leadership, self-development books I’ve read in recent memory.  I had lots of Ah Ha! moments in reading this book, as Epstein pointed out trends and phenomena that I had observed with implications that I had never considered.   The fact that Range changed Malcolm Gladwell’s mind, or at least his perspective on his “10,000” hours rule is telling – not only about the cogency of his arguments against over-specialization, but also about Gladwell’s openness to have his mind changed. Gladwell and Epstein debated this book in public, and Gladwell’s mind was changed, and he strongly endorses this book and its message.

Epstein challenges conventional wisdom on the advantages of getting a head start in life, specializing early, the value of experts, the value of consistent “block” training.  He also argues for the advantages of “desirable difficulties” in training and learning, how expertise can inhibit creativity and so on.

Epstein  doesn’t dispute that we need specialists or experts, but argues that to deal with complex problems in the “wicked world” (complex, unpredictable, uncertain rules,) the specialists must serve the generalists who will have a much broader and wiser perspective.  He argues that the very best generalists are those who were once specialists but then broadened their knowledge and continued to feed their curiosity, explored other unrelated areas and became generalists.  Epstein argues we need both, but the big decisions need to be made by generalists. And this book tells you why.

I got this book through the Next Big Idea club which publishes a short pamphlet with each book they send.  Below is a very brief summary of the key points included in the pamphlet that came with Range.  They listed 9 big ideas in Range:

1. The Cult of the Headstart points to how specializing early may not lead to the best results in the long run.  In the short run, yes, but overtime, usually not.   Research has showed that people who had a broad general education more often find what they love to do over the long run and succeed at it better than those who specialize early.  This is a theme that he builds on throughout the book.  People who start out highly invested in a specific path early, change paths much more often than those who try a number of paths before picking the one they will invest in for the long term.  Specializing early, before one truly knows oneself, can be a trap.
2. Winners Quit and Quitters Win is a challenge to people who take Angela Duckworth’s Grit too seriously.  In fact one of the chapter titles is “The trouble with too much Grit”.  This big idea is not new.  Fail fast, fail often – while trying to find that “Match Quality” between what you love and what you do.   This message echos the message in You Are Awesome – “lose more to win more.”
3. It’s a Wicked World distinguishes between “kind” learning environments, and “wicked” learning environments.  “Kind” environments are those with clear rules, similar patterns, predictable challenges, consequences of decisions are readily apparent.  He says that a lot of games or sports are “kind” learning environments – such as chess and golf.  They lend themselves to “deliberate practice.”  In “wicked” environments, the rules aren’t clear, or may change, there are no obvious patterns, and the consequences of decisions may not be apparent for quite some time, and immediate feedback may be inaccurate.   Specialists are most useful in “kind” environments, which are predictable and pretty well understood. Generalists who have a wide variety of experience in different contexts will often be most successful in “wicked” environments. From the pamphlet, “….learning in a wide variety of contexts will prepare you for the wicked environment, where the ability to learn without the benefit of prior experienced is critical.”
4. Cognitive Flexibility comes from an ability to make connections across domains – to take lessons from one context and apply them in a very different context.   He offers a number of examples of how those with deep knowledge in a narrow area are often at a loss when it comes to understanding and applying conceptual schemes in areas beyond their own experience or expertise.
5. The Power of Analogies is highlighted as another strength of the generalist to compare and see common lessons in two very different situations.  Similarities in structure between two very different situations that are not immediately apparent because on the surface they appear very different.  Seeing these similarities requires  “cognitive flexibility” and a broader scope of knowledge and experience than the expert specialist will usually have. He gives an example of how a military strategy helped doctors find the right treatment for a specific cancer problem.
6. He has a chapter entitled “Learning to Drop your familiar tools” which makes the point again, how humans cling to what they know and how they are accustomed to  doing things.  He gives numerous examples of how people have held on to their well-entrenched and well-trained methods, often at great cost when the environment has changed.  He advocates getting used to doing familiar tasks with different tools, and changing the familiar tasks to force learners to ditch familiar tools and adjust to the situation. This section reminded me of the old saw, “Necessity is the mother of invention” – in that when we take away the old tools,  we often come up with new and better ones.
7. Ditch your long term plans. This lesson emphasizes the point that we often make long term plans when we don’t have enough information, and really don’t know ourselves or what we want.  He gives the example of Frances Hasselbein who kept getting distracted from her long term plans by doing other things that really appealed to her,  and ended up being one of the most successful non-profit CEOs in America in the 20th century.  His point is that we learn about who we are and what we like by choosing to learn from each endeavor – and that our long term plans made when we are younger, often will not fit the person we become from new experiences.  Simple truth:  “We learn who we are by doing, not simply by thinking.”
8. Making Learning Difficult enhances learning. This is a lesson from Make it Stick, by Brown, Roediger et al about how struggling to learn, enhances long term learning and retention, whereas easy learning, enhances short term learning and retention.  Here again, he argues against “block learning” – intense and focused deliberate practice – and instead argues for “interleaving” – learning spread out over time, coming back to what was learned before and testing it under different circumstances.  He talks about the “generation effect” in which we struggle to find the answer and how that is much more effective for long term retention of what was learned than when the answer is readily available.
9. His argument for the Outsider Advantage in solving wicked problems is a warning against experts.  Experts and specialists have focused their study and attention on what they know and how conventional wisdom in their field has directed them.  That focus creates a set of blinders that the outsider doesn’t have.  Epstein gives a number of examples of how outsiders with an unbiased curiosity have asked questions that experts weren’t asking, have seen problems that experts didn’t see, and found solutions to those problems that experts often couldn’t envision.  His message:  Don’t overly trust the experts.  A curious and thoughtful outsider may have insights that the expert specialists are not trained to see.  And my own experience is that the designation “expert” can bring with it a bit of arrogance and closed mindedness that is difficult to overcome.

Quotes from the book – not exact, but a good review for me:  (page numbers from Riverhead Books hardback edition 2019)

P 21 In wicked domains the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns or they many not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

22 Marvec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

P. 25 Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw.

P. 29  The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution.  Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization.  It is the ability to integrate broadly.

P. 33 But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill.  …example:  When the order of play was altered experts had a more difficult time adapting to new rules than did non-experts.  – this is “cognitive entrenchment.”

P. 33 The scientist inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation.  And those who have won the Nobel Prize are more likely still.  The most successful experts also belong to the wider world.  Creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “this breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain specific expertise alone.”

P. 47 so long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.  …”The ability to freely shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’

P. 53 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.  …And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands – conceptual reasoning skill that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.  …The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training.

P. 88 Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful.  The struggle is real, and really useful .  “like life, Kornell said “retrieval is all about the journey.”

P. 89 For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.  If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, to that the test will be more difficult when you do. Furstration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.

P. 91 the professors who caused short-term struggle but long -term gains were facilitating ”deep Learning” by making connections.

P. 92 “Desirable difficulties.” “ Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and student must avoid interpreting current performance as learning.  Good performane on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers neeed to be aware that such performanc will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”

P. 94 Practicing the same thing repeatedly, each problem employing the same procedure is “blocked” practice.  It leads to excellent immediate performance, but for knowledge to be flexible, it should be learned under varied conditions, an approach called varied or mixed practice, or to researtchers, “interleaving.”  Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning.

P. 95 The feeling of learning it turns out is based on before your eyes progress, while deep learning is not.” When your intuition says block, you should probably interleave.”   Interleaving is a desireable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills.

P. 94  Deisrable difficulties slow down learning and make performance suffer in the short term.  That can be a problem because we all reflexicvely assess our progress by how we are doing right now.  .

P. 97  A head start comes fast, but deep learning is slow.  Learning deeply means learning slowly.  The cult of the head start fails the learners it seeks to serve.

P. 98 “Far Transfer” – When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations.

P. 102  Deep alnalogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.    Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light and allows humans to reason through prooblems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts.

P. 104  A kind world is based on repeating patterns.  It’s perfectly fine if you stay in the same village or the same savannah all your life. The current world is not so kind; it requires thinking that cannot fall back on previous experience.

P. 110 Focusing narrowly on many fine details specific to a problem at hand feels like the exact right thing to do, when it is often exactly wrong.

P 112 Evaluating an array of options BEFORE letting intuition reign is a trick for the wicked world.  …. Just being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative.

P. 113 Like the venture capitalists, their intuition was to use too few analogies and to rely on those that were the most superficially similar.  “That’s usually exactly the wrong way to go about it,  regardless of what you’re using analogy for.”

P.115 An interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion:  Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it…. For the best performers, problem solving begins with the typing of the problem… a problem well-stated is half solved.

p. 128 Match quality is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are – their abilities and proclivities.

P. 129 If they sampled early, and focused later, they entered the job market with fewer domain specific skills, but a greater sense of the type of work that fit their abilities and inclinations

P 130  Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself.  Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

P 136 Seth Godin disparages the idea that quitters never win – he argues that winners quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it.  ….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.

P. 143 Finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.

P 157 (chapter title:  flirting with your possible selves.)  Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to experience.

P 161 We learn who we are only by living, and not before…..We maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives.  And repeat…..  precisely the opposite of a vast marketing crusade that assures customers that they can alight on their perfect matches via introspection alone.   Ibarra, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom,  “First act.. then think… We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities and building new networks, finding new role models.”  We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

p. 163  “ Who do I really want to become?”  It is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested – “Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now?  How can I do that?”  Be a flirt with your possible selves.   “Test and learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan and implement.”

p. 163  You’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: “premature optimization”…Instead of working back from a goal, we should work forward from promising situations.  This is what most successful people actually do anyway.,

p173  Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking:  Finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.

p. 177  Einstellung Effekt – the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods, even if better ones are available.

p. 178  Our research shows that a domain-based solution is often inferior. Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far way from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.

p. 179. “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. “

p. 181 Sometimes the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.

p. 193  Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the re-imagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses.

p. 198 There is, to be sure, no comprehensive theory of creativity.  But there is a well-documented tendency to consider only familiar uses for objects, an instinct known as functional fixedness.

p. 200-201. We need both hyper-specialists and lateral thinking generalists… both frogs in the swamp and visionary birds.  The work is both broad and deep.

p. 210 Individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.

p. 210 In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly.

p. 213 Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient.  The problem is that we often expect the hyper-specialists, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems.  The results can be disastrous.

p. 221  The narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,: and the integrator foxes, who know many little things….Hedgehog experts were deep but narrow…The foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,..Where hedgehogs represented narrowness, foxes ranged outside a single discipline or theory and embodied breadth.

p. 221 Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their domain of expertise. They actually got worse the more information they had to work with  –  the more they were able to fit any story to their world view.

p. 225  Often if you’re too much of an insider (subject matter expert) it’s hard to get good perspective….Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, but you have to understand that they may have blinders on.

p. 227 A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.”

p. 246-7  Weick: “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.”…Experienced groups became rigid under pressure and regress to what why know best.

p. 248  Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on over-learned behavior. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool.

p. 248  Overlearned behavior. That is they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as  situaption-specific tool.

p. 248  “Hunches held lightly”  should be weighed against the need for data. Data is important, but hunches are not to be ignored (consistent with Daniel Kahneman’s  Thinking Fast and Slow)

p. 249 When you don’t have any data, you have to use reason.

p. 255 Congruence is a social science term for cultural “fit” among an institution’s components -values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles – this is a long time pillar of organizational theory.

p. 255 Congruent institutions did have an easier time classifying the culture when asked, but there was no impact at all on performance….the most effective leaders and organization had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical.  They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic, all at once.  A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful.

p 257  The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice –  whatever it happened to be – with forces that pushed in the opposite direction…. The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture, and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.

p. 258 A paper written on the Challenger disaster had the subtitle:  “Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity with Reckless Deviation.”

p. 259  Effective leaders go looking for problems, hunches, and bad news, even rewarding those who exposed problems.

p. 260  Strongly congruent cultures often fail to learn.

p. 262  The chain of communication has to be informal, completely different from the chain of command.

p. 264 This difference between “chain of communication” and “chain of command” represents a healthy cross-pressure.  (One leader said) “I warned them that I’m going to communicate with all levels of the organization down to the shop floor, and you can’t feel suspicious or paranoid about that.”

p.273 An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme in research on creative thinkers.  

p. 275  He arrived in a workspace that treated mental meandering as a competitive advantage, not a pest to be exterminated in the name of efficiency….That kind of protection from the cult of the head start is increasingly rare (though) at some point or other, we all specialize to one degree or another.

p. 278 He compared the current system to a medieval guild, designed to maintain and protect specialized skills and trades….Training and professional incentives are aligning to accelerate specialization, creating intellectual archipelagos.  

p. 280  New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” … Human creativity is basically an “import/export business of ideas.”

p. 281  Living/working overseas creates “arbitrage” opportunities, the chance to take an idea from one market and bring it to another where it is more rare and valued – to bring new skills to an old problem, or a new problem to old skills. 

p. 282 Casadevall:  “I always advise my people to read outside their field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have the time to read outside my filed.  I say, “No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”

p. 283  The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.

p. 284 Casedevall’s overarching point is that the innovation ecosystem should intentionally preserve range and inefficiency.  He is fighting an uphill battle.

p. 286  At its core, all hyper specialization is a well- meaning drive for efficiency – the most efficient way to develop a sports skill, assemble a product, learn to play in instrument, or work on a new technology.  But inefficiency needs cultivating too.  The wisdom of laser-focused, efficient development is limited to narrowly constructed, kind learning environments.

p. 288  Creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the more work eminent creators produced, the more duds they churned out, and the higher their chances of a supernova success.

p. 288 Original creators tend to strike out a lot, but they also hit mega grand slams – every once n a while when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.