Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

The whole idea of the book fits in the comparison between two stars. Tiger Woods picked up a club as a baby, and at age two he was already on television hitting golf shots. His father planned everything: it was early, concentrated learning, and it worked the way you'd imagine.

Roger Federer did it differently. As a kid, he played soccer, basketball, skiing, swimming, badminton, skateboarding and other things, and only committed to tennis later. His mother was a coach, but she didn't manage her son's training. Federer became one of the greatest in history, and the author asks: what if Tiger is the exception, not the rule?

David Epstein calls this range: having varied experiences, knowing several fields, changing direction. The thesis is that, in a world full of surprises, range is usually worth more than we think.

You've probably heard that to become great at something, you need ten thousand hours of practice. The idea became famous from research with violinists and from popular books. Epstein's book doesn't say practice doesn't matter. It says the rule was read in an exaggerated way, as if, for anything, the earlier and more focused, the better.

The problem is that this math works well in some fields and poorly in others. Chess and golf have fixed rules, and intense training pays off. But think of a store manager, a nurse or an entrepreneur: the rules change every week, and hours spent repeating the same thing don't guarantee you're ready for the new situation.

Another caution is to look only at the winners. When we only hear the story of those who got there by training a lot, it seems like practice is the only explanation, and the people who trained just as hard and didn't make it vanish from the conversation. This shortcut is easy to fall for in test prep, in sports and at work.

Psychologist Robin Hogarth talks about kind environments, where patterns repeat and feedback is quick and clear, like in chess and golf. You make a mistake, see the result right away, and adjust. In that kind of place, early specialization works very well.

On the other side are wicked environments, where the rules are vague, feedback is slow or misleading, and past experience can get in the way. Adult life looks more like this: career, money, relationships. A salesperson who closed lots of sales in one neighborhood can do badly after moving to another city, because what worked there didn't work here.

Epstein argues that, in wicked environments, what protects you is knowing how to transfer what you learned from one place to another. And that is trained by seeing lots of different things.