The argument for a generalist late bloomer

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein

This is a thesis that dives deep into the argument between specializing in a rigid structure vs. being a generalist that can creatively perform in many different contexts. With the author, David Epstein, is making the case for the latter.

In the book Epstein shows that switching career early on is actually beneficial, that quitting is not for losers but to quit fast and early means that you identify that you’re not a good fit, and can find something else you feel much suited to thrive.

And it is supported by the data. He reveals, among many others, that the fastest-growing startups are not only founded by teenage hot shots (those 20 under 20) but statistically the average age of the founders are actually 45. Indeed, this entire book is making the case for a late bloomer who has accumulate years of general experiences in multiple discipline, and only then can apply them into a specialized force.

To back up his thesis Epstein uses so many great studies from diverse experts from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, to economist Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), to marketing guru Seth Godin, among many other experts.

And to illustrate his points Epstein uses incredible range of stories such as the chess prodigy family, Socialist revolution in Kyrgyzstan, Baroque musicians from middle age Venice, classical vs jazz musicians, class math problems, 16th century astronomy, a surgeon’s dilemma, Fed fund rate and the economy, the long journey of Nintendo, statistical correlations between Brexit voters and anti gun control crowds, and the famous Carter Racing case study (and the plot twist in the end!).

Moreover, Epstein also uses the history of plenty of famous names, such as the long vocational path of Vincent van Gogh, J. K. Rowling’s failure in life before made it big, Charles Darwin who initially wanted to become a clergyman, a psychiatrist who became a Buddhist monk, the story of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami who at 29 was running a jazz bar before shifting vocation to a novelist, and of course the contrast upbringing between Tiger Woods (specialized) and Roger Federer (generalist) that became the anchoring point right from the beginning.

One surprising area that came up in the book is a glimpse of a world where humans and AI can possibly coexist, with AI focus more on the small tactics and humans have more on the big-picture strategy. Which could prompt us to think that probably the answer to the worry of the rise of AI is being a big-picture generalist and lead the robots to do the tactical moves within the corridor of our strategy.

Here are some of the most impactful quotes from the book:

Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande pointed out that when doctors joke about left ear surgeons, “we have to check to be sure they don’t exist.”
An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.
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.
While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.
I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators.
I delved further and encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their range of experiences and interests, but because of it: a CEO who took her first job around the time her peers were getting ready to retire; an artist who cycled through five careers before he discovered his vocation and changed the world; an inventor who stuck to a self-made antispecialization philosophy and turned a small company founded in the nineteenth century into one of the most widely resonant names in the world today.
When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.
Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.
The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear. We all rely on chunking every day in skills in which we are expert.
But the game’s strategic complexity provides a lesson: 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.
“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
But tennis is still very much on the kind end of the spectrum compared to, say, a hospital emergency room, where doctors and nurses do not automatically find out what happens to a patient after their encounter. They have to find ways to learn beyond practice, and to assimilate lessons that might even contradict their direct experience.
The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.
We have been using the wrong stories. Tiger’s story and the Polgar story give the false impression that human skill is always developed in an extremely kind learning environment. If that were the case, specialization that is both narrow and technical and that begins as soon as possible would usually work. But it doesn’t even work in most sports.
There are domains beyond chess in which massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition. Like golfers, surgeons improve with repetition of the same procedure. Accountants and bridge and poker players develop accurate intuition through repetitive experience. But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill.
When experienced accountants were asked in a study to use a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one, they did worse than novices. Erik Dane, a Rice University professor who studies organizational behavior, calls this phenomenon “cognitive entrenchment.”
The most successful experts also belong to the wider world.
The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests.
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.
The Handbook simply notes that, in contrast to classical players, jazz and folk and modern popular musicians and singers do not follow a simple, narrow trajectory of technical training, and they “start much later.”
“It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
Human intuition, it appears, is not very well engineered to make use of the best tools when faced with what the researchers called “ill-defined” problems. Our experience-based instincts are set up well for Tiger domains, the kind world Gentner described, where problems and solutions repeat.
They all appear to have excelled in spite of their late starts. It would be easy enough to cherry-pick stories of exceptional late developers overcoming the odds. But they aren’t exceptions by virtue of their late starts, and those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.
Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
In England and Wales, students were expected to pick a path with knowledge only of the limited menu they had been exposed to early in high school. That is sort of like being forced to choose at sixteen whether you want to marry your high school sweetheart. At the time it might seem like a great idea, but the more you experience, the less great that idea looks in hindsight.
Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.
The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.
Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential reward is extremely high. Thanks to constant feedback and an unforgiving weed-out process, those who try will learn quickly if they might be a match, at least compared to jobs with less constant feedback. If they aren’t, they go test something else, and continue to gain information about their options and themselves.
The more skilled the Army thought a prospective officer could become, the more likely it was to offer a scholarship. And as those hardworking and talented scholarship recipients blossomed into young professionals, they tended to realize that they had a lot of career options outside the military. Eventually, they decided to go try something else. In other words, they learned things about themselves in their twenties and responded by making match quality decisions.
She never did graduate from college, but her office is festooned with twenty-three honorary doctorates, plus a glistening saber given to her by the U.S. Military Academy for teaching leadership courses—as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
“I feel sorry for the people who know exactly what they’re going to do from the time they’re sophomores in high school,” he said. In his memoir, [Nike founder Phil] Knight wrote that he “wasn’t much for setting goals,” and that his main goal for his nascent shoe company was to fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture. He made one short-term pivot after another, applying the lessons as he went.
Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with getting a law or medical degree or PhD. But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed. People realize things about themselves halfway through medical school.
Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end of history illusion.” From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.
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.
“Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry,” Pegau said. “I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.” Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.
In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed.
“Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.
I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ 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.

It is soothing to learn that the road to success is not only the survivorship bias tales from the billionaires, great musicians, or the pro athletes, etc where a child prodigy has been amassing 10,000 hours worth of experience before the age of 7.

But instead, there’s another pathway that is actually used by the majority of people. One that is more grounded in the trial-and-error environment, where people organically learn about themselves as they grow up, one that can provide career-changing inspiration only after decades of doing many other things, or one that can prepare us to survive the rise of AI: by being the jack of all trades and master of one, but one that could come later in life after collecting an abundance of experiences in many different fields.

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