#008: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
To be a fox in a wicked world is like being a fish in the sea
Hi there. Hope you're doing well.
One of the open questions that I've had for some time is: what is the value of being well rounded in many things without being specialized in one? A jack of all trades but master of none?
Obviously I think of myself when I ask this question. As a founder of a company, I must go deep in understanding the organization but broad enough so I cover every part of it. How is this useful to the rest of the world? Whenever you hear of a crisis, you inevitable hear about Governmental bodies meeting with experts. I can't help but think: in what field would the government call me in to be an expert?
Reading this book was illuminating for me. It tries to demonstrate through an extensive collection of research that being a generalist will help you more to deal with the wicked world.
It helped me to answer the government question: people should ask experts for facts and not opinions on how to solve problems. And I want to be solving problems in my life.
Hope you take as much as I did from this book. Really enjoyed reading it.
TLDR
- Timeless? ⚠️ published in 2019
- Comprehensive? ✅⚠️ it has hundreds of studies and people mentioned. Although I missed reading about counter points/research.
- Mental model? ✅ The book is one big mental model with different facets to it.
- Return on investment of reading? ✅ Exactly the type of book I enjoy reading, with many studies
- All in all: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(4/5)
- Should you read it: Yes. I think there's tons of counter intuitive lessons on how to approach your career, parenting and life in general. It has helped me to look at certain problems differently.
Before we start:
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The Book
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Key ideas of the book
👉 Specialists are great when rules are obvious or non changing (i.e. kind environments). Generalists perform better in wicked environments with mutable and unpredictable rules.
👉 The path to true elite performance is through late specialization which includes:
Early sampling period, lightly structured with some lessons and breadth of activity
Later specialization, increased structure, explosion of practice and volume
👉 Connect concepts far and wide and don’t shy away from using analogies. Great thinkers use many analogies.
👉 How people approach building their careers:
Analyze who I am at the moment
Analyze my motivations
Analyze what I've found I like to do
Analyze what I'd like to learn
Here are the opportunities
👉 People should be optimizing for match quality in their careers as opposed to just being resilient.
👉 Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to apply a strategy
👉 In wicked environments, improvements in experience does not mean improvement in performance. An hour of 🦊 fox training improves forecasting.
It’s better to be a Federer than a Tiger
Tiger Woods is the prototypical specialist. He started practicing golf at a very early age, before he could even speak, even appeared on television showing his swing.
He was so young that even his father had to develop a type of special communication to explain him how to golf. His father would fall in the category of Tiger parents.
On the other, spectrum, Roger Federer, tennis super legend, discovered tennis late, after sampling other sports. His mother, a tennis coach, did not want to teach him how to play tennis with fear he would upset her.
These were two different approaches to parenting. Pull (Roger) vs Push (Tiger).
The book explores these two ways of looking at the world: the specialized and generalists. And postulates that early specialization is not an effective path to success.
Researchers found that children who started deliberate practice too early give up that practice later on giving an advantage to other children. There's a stigma to not having your life figured out.
People with high expertise behaving similarly in which they see patterns based on what they've seen before. Because they've seen patterns before, they tend to trust their expert judgment, so they go with their first idea. Unfortunately, this does not mean it is the best decision. This is connected with the idea that humans prefer ideas that are more available to them. To be a specialist is to have always the same toolset at our disposal. Further, specialists have high confidence and don't question their judgment, also making them defensive.
Expertise influences confidence but not skill.
It’s a wicked world
The book introduces a concept: Kind vs Wicked problems.
Kind learning environments have defined and static rules where feedback is quick and accurate. Chess or golf are kind environments for example.
Wicked learning environments, on the other hand, don't have defined rules or they change frequently. Feedback is delayed or non existent.
Specialization works great in kind environments. But the world around us is unstructured and without rules. People who developed their skills in kind environments have a hard time adjusting to wicked ones. By virtue of extensive repetition, experts build efficiencies in how they operate which don’t translate to other problems well.
An experiment found in 2007 that elite chess players were able to memorize and reproduce chess boards with only 3s of observation. However, when impossible chess boards were displayed (with pieces put in impossible positions), they failed at reproducing them. They did not have photographic memory, they only created fast optimizations for decision making (called chunking).
Machines are getting terribly good at solving problems in kind environments. AI systems are like Savants in which they need very structured and predictable rule sets to operate well. However, when you remove these rules and structure, these systems fail. Example: Google Flu Trends was using search queries to predict flu trends. One year it predicted 2x more flu new cases than reality.
The bigger the picture, the higher the potential for human contribution.
Your previous experience can be detrimental.
Chris Argyris found that consultants from top business schools had "single loop learning cycles" and used the most familiar solution. He also found they got defensive when question about their solutions.
Barry Schwartz did an experiment where students who undergone previous training/conditioning were worse than students with no experience at discovering rules.
Cognitive entrenchment happens when people who have narrow experience are exposed to new challenges (requiring different rule sets) in which they try to use their previous experience even if it's wrong.
The antidote is to have "one foot outside your world"
A way to break cognitive entrenchment is through Hogarth's "circuit breakers" - the multi discipline learning helps to dispute previous decisions, helping the person avoid the same patterns.
Christopher Connolly found that people who travel on "eight-lane highways" (i.e. have a multitude of disciplines to take from), and kept multiple career options open were more successful.
The Flynn effect
James Flynn found in 81 that there's an increase in correct IQ answers for every new generation. He looked at IQ tests from soldiers in WWI vs WWII and saw an improvement. It's called the Flynn Effect: 3 point increase every 10 years.
Modern children are proven to be more effective at solving problems and thinking about intangible/conceptual things compared to older people. This is because pre-modern people miss the forest for the trees. Alternatively, modern people sometimes miss the trees for the forest. Villagers not exposed to modern world fail to have principles in thinking about problems and can only use real world literal thinking.
Raven's is a psychological test that gauges the ability for people to group things in abstract categories. Modern people in civilized countries are able to be cognitively flexible.
Sampling is great
In 17th/18th century, Venice was witness to an explosion in musical production and innovation. Kings and leaders would travel far to see Vivaldi and, specially, a few famous female musicians known for being multi-instrumentalists. They were known as the Figlie from Ospedale della Pietà. They played behind curtains or in church balconies due to disfigurement, despite their angelic music.
Ospedale della Pietà started as a private/public partnership to take care of orphans. Orphans would play multiple instruments as they were available. As children grew, some would help in mass, playing songs. After some time, a correlation was found between women playing music and the amount of offerings the church would get. This made the church to start asking the figlie to play more and more. Their fame great to the point that Vivaldi wrote 140 concertos for them.
Their flexibility in playing instruments is believed to be the reason of their virtuosity.
There are many examples of music players who became experts by experimenting different instruments and achieving versatility.
John Sloboda found that the most successful students started to practice more once they found an instrument they liked. A high number of hours in lessons only correlated to average performance. Children who focused on various instruments were identified as exceptional.
The jazz musician is a creative artist
The classical musician is a re-creative artist
Learning fast and slow
The more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates deep abstract models, the less they rely on particular examples. When you go deep into problems and identify conceptual frameworks that are cross boundary, this is called far transfer.
There are two techniques to teach:
Using procedure, where students are asked to practice something learning through repetition
Making connections, which introduces a broader concept like asking "why" a formula works.
Students sometimes seek to transform conceptual problems into procedural ones (e.g. to pass exams). But the slower, the harder the lesson is, and the more it is connected with other concepts, the better is memorized and ultimately understood.
Research suggests that to give students and children early starts, people should focus on "open" skills instead of "closed". Teaching to read too early on is pointless as everyone will learn to read eventually. Instead, it’s better to teach how to hunt for information and connect contextual clues to understand the inner fabric of things.
Analogies as the gateway to creativity
Analogies enable us to reason about areas that we've never seen before and enable us to build conceptual bridges. The ability to relate/to think relationally enables us to think about problems we've never seen. In order to operate and reason in wicked environments, we can't rely only on previous thinking and conclusions.
The most creative people leverage many analogies for situations. Johannes Kepler, best known for his laws of planetary motion, was known to be an avid user of analogies when he was exploring orbital models. At the time, astronomy was dogmatic and based on religious beliefs. We want to stay away from explaining events through 'spirits'. He explored many analogies to reason about observations for which he had no model to think about.
As humans, we don't have good tools to solve ill defined problems. Great problem solvers start by understanding the problem. An experiment in Stanford studied students who were pondering a potential intervention in a fictional democracy thwarted by another country. Students who were told to think of WWII when solving the problem were pro-intervention. Students who were asked to think about Vietnam were pro negotiation and diplomacy.
Having an inside or outside view influences how we compare things. The outside view looks for deep structural similarities between problems. This requires the mind to look broad between concepts instead of narrow/specialized in few concepts.
The right way to operate seems to be to generate multiple analogies, the farther from the problem the better.
Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to apply a strategy. Worst performers group problems by superficial traits.
Kevin Dunbar wanted to study how biology labs work, for example, in fighting against viruses like HIV. In one particular lab, he attended lab meetings every Monday that included a diverse group of people like the lab directors, grad students, post doc fellows etc. The main part of the meeting was highly creative and included many analogies. He found that the lab most likely to find transformative finding made the biggest number of analogies, particularly far from the domain at hand. Labs with scientists from more different backgrounds had more analogies.
Kevin then compared this lab was compared to another where everyone had expertise in E.coli research. They got less problems solved and were less creative because the only solution revolved around E.coli. (the man with only one hammer tendency)
Match quality over Grit
He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so bangs his head against the bards of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering
A man, too, he exhorted, “doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! . . . I know that I could be a quite different man! . . . There’s something within me, so what is it!”
The book tells the story of Vincent Van Gogh. He loved long walks in nature. He started as a mediocre student, then art dealer, then teacher. At 27 he decided to finally become a painter. Everyone disliked his work because it lacked finesse and technical expertise. Yes he ended up becoming one of the most celebrated painters of all time.
More artists who found their calling later, like Van Gogh, include Gauguin, who only discovered his calling at the age of 36, and JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter. She went through early failures, a divorce and then become a single mother on welfare. She said that during this time she felt free to do work that explored her interests and virtues.
Late starters attribute their success to starting late
Match quality is the degree of fit between work and identity - abilities and proclivities.
High match quality means someone has found work that is aligned with interests and abilities. This notion came after a study that Ofer Malamud conducted comparing English and Irish students with Scottish students. He found that in English, students had to specialize in order to apply to programs. In Scotland, students had to sample different subjects in their first year of college. He found that English students were more likely to switch career often after taking their first job (i.e. they were less aware of the inner workings of their match quality).
Learning stuff is less important than learning about oneself
Steven Levitt found that people who took a gamble on changing careers were happier than those considering but not moving on. Change is dreadful and stigmatized but it can pay dividends in the long run.
Switchers are winners
The Grit score, by Angela Duckworth, was used to predict resilience in domains like the U.S. Military Academy and the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The test evaluated two attributes: passion and perseverance. The problem with the grit score as it was shown is that it suffered from a lack of random population. Example: measuring success in NBA Players would not include height as a variable because everyone is tall already. If we filter out a world of variables, we don't truly understand the world.
In the case of cadets in the military bootcamp, cadets dropped out because they were not a good fit. After 20 years, 3/4ths left which is bad retention and makes Grit score a bad predictor. The army invested 0.5m per cadet to try to keep people and it failed.
This is a problem of Match Quality. When people left the army, people thought it signaled loss of motivation but it is the opposite: drive for personal growth.
The Army changed approaches and instead of money, gave the options to offices to choose their career path. This increased retention because it increased Match quality.
Knowing when to quit is a strategic advantage.
Frances Hesselbein goes down in history as one of the most awarded CEOs. She had a non-obvious and non-linear career path in which she took her first professional job at 54, was CEO of Girl Scouts for 13 years. Her career path was truly amazing.
I was unaware I was being prepared.
I learned by doing what was needed at the time
Most careers paths are non obvious and unforeseen. This was the conclusion of the work by Rose and Ogas who studied careers and found the majority have emergent paths.
Key question: which is the best match right now?
Charles Darwin had planned to be a lawyer. But he found the lectures very dull. Darwin then planned to be a clergyman but was invited onboard the HMS Beagle in a post college gap year, in which he had to promise his father he would not become an unemployed man.
Brent W Roberts found that our personality changes as we get older. The biggest change i between 18 and late 20s. Yet it's the time we're asked to start specialize in a career. Your personality changes therefore should our plans as well
Planning goals too long term is pointless. We evolve. Changing is good and required.
Look at the options available now and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterwards
Paul Graham
Outside in thinking
It’s positive to source answers in experiences outside the domain of the problem itself. The value of being outside, and connecting with generalized thinking is that people can bring analogies and other connection to more concepts.
When outsiders can reframe problems, breakthroughs can happen. Example: NASA had a challenge predicting solar particle storms and were stuck for 30 years. They posted this challenge in a public forum (InnoCentive). In 6 months a retired engineer solved the challenge.
Thinking outside the box as a specialist continues to be a small box to think in. A generalist has breadth.
Finally: the value is having specialists and generalists collaborating. More than just being locked in a hyper-specialized field, experts can leverage generalists by sharing information - which helps by being connected to other sources of external help. Generalists can leverage specialists as a source of facts, not opinions.
Lateral Thinking with withered technology
Essentially, thinking of new uses to older technology:
Lateral thinking means reusing information in different new contexts, with seemingly disparate concepts
Withered technology means proven old tech, readily available and without the need for a specialized knowledge
Most known for this: Nintendo.
Gunpei Yokoi, one of the early employees of Nintendo, once saw a salaryman playing on the train with his calculator. he had the idea for a portable gaming device. He pitched his boss during a time when Yokoi chauffeured him. This spurred the innovations that led to Game Boy.
Following a formula Nintendo has followed well, the Game Boy used proven technology, with less excitement than other products, in a consistent and solid way. It was durable, with great battery life. The game boy became the standard. It created also a network effect through game development. It sold 1187m units.
When the gameboy was released, Yokoi's colleage came to him "with a grim expression on his face" and reported that a competitor handheld had hit the market. Yokoi asked him if it had a color screen. The man said it did "then we're fine", said Yokoi.
Specialist inventions are able to solve complex technical problems. Generalist inventors pull in different ideas. Ouderkirk studied inventors and found that specialist inventors are declining since 1985. In a world with more information than you can ever process, there is a larger opportunity to mix and match.
People profiles who are I shaped only go deep
People profiles who are T shaped are broad and deep in one vertical.
Abbie Griffin found that serial innovators shared the same traits
High tolerance for ambiguity
Systems thinkers
Additional technical knowledge from adjacent domains
Analogies
Information connectors
Many ideas
Range of interest
Read more and more broadly
We expect specialists to extend their skills to wicked problems. It's difficult for them to be successful at doing so.
Fooled by expertise2 or How to be a Superforecaster
Philip Tetlock created this metaphor:
🦔 Hedgehogs: know one big thing
🦊 Foxes: know many little things
Hedgehogs bend the world to fit their narrow views. They reach for formulaic solutions to ill defined problems. They're proven right by success and failure.
Foxes draw from many sources. They encompass breadth. They hunt for information is like a literal fox's hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously. It's not what they think but **how** they think. Foxes see complexity when others see cause -> effect.
Hedgehogs are very important: Einstein was a hedgehog for example.
Philip Tetlock explores this concept in Superforecasters where he studied short and long term forecasts by experts (284). They were asked to give probabilities of events. The average expert was a horrible forecaster. Even when experts declared something impossible, 15% of the times that something happened. When they succeeded, they were responsible. When they failed, they were still right and had excuses.
However, there was a group of people who integrated contradictory world views. This group did much better in forecasting. They were composed of foxes. He found that this group of foxes was able to beat by 30% a collection of intelligence analysts. They were also strong collaborators.
For forecasting, narrow experts were still valuable but they may be blinded by their own narrowness.
Take facts and not opinions from them.
Superforecasters are people that have these attributes:
They are foxes with dragonfly eyes (thousands of lenses).
Superforecasters disagree without being disagreeable.
They want to get as many opinions as possible.
As super forecasters collaborate, they consider many views.
They question and flip flop (change opinions) many times.
They work together and are not defensive.
They encourage colleagues to falsify their views.
They have Active Open Mindedness
In wicked environments, improvements in experiences does not mean improvement in performance. An hour of fox training improves forecasting. Forecasters gain by using analogies and finding deep structural similarities between topics.
Learning to drop your familiar tools
The Challenger Launch Decision is a case study in reaching conclusions from incomplete data and over relying on the tools and processes without considering or hearing other opinions. NASA had a culture of being extremely data driven. Because reason without numbers was not accepted, they moved forward with the launch.
⛔️ In God we trust, all others bring data ⛔️
Some engineers had concerns about the launch of the Challenger but because they couldn't back their claims with data, their input was not considered. Richard Feynman was part of the challenger's commission and he said
When you don't have the data, you have to use reason
Humans associate their tools to their identity and to control. So much that they also associate losing their tools to losing the experience or training they have. We think that losing our tools is the same as unlearning. Because of this humans are almost willing to die rather than losing their tools.
Examples:
Firefighters in 4 different fires refused orders to drop their tools.
Karl Wallenda died while wire walking. He grabbed his pole instead of the wire. As he fell down to his death, he grabbed it again in mid air.
Instead of decisions, one can have senses or hunches. Decision suffer from endowment effect (i.e. we own them therefore we like them more than other decisions), sense are more fluid.
Hunches held lightly
Tools serve situations and they should be de-coupled from identity or control.
Incongruence is the idea of lack of perfect internal alignment which builds cross-checks (sanity checks) in your decisions. In order to build incongruence, one must first identify what is the dominant culture trait: cohesion or individualism? After, one must incentivize the opposite trait. Teams need both elements of hierarchy and individualism to excel and survive. Incongruence helps to find important useful cues to drop standard operating procedures.
No tool is omnipotent. There is no such thing as a master key that will unlock all doors
Arnold Toynbee
Deliberate Amateurs
Oliver Smithies, a molecular biologist, took free time as an unpressured opportunity to experiment. He would use his Saturday to experiment when "you don't have to be completely rational". Oliver would say to his students:
Take your skills and apply them to a new problems. Or have your problem and try completely new skills
Oliver found through studying 10k researchers that there is no relationship between experience and contribution. In other words, the most impactful work of each researcher could happen at any time in one's career (not depending on previous work)
Sarah Lewis calls Deliberate Amateurs people who pretend they just began a career which enables them to find new things.
I don't dig deep; I grate shallow
I don't like re-search; only search
Andre Geim
Arturo Casadevall thinks that the higher rate of retractions in scientific work is higher now because young scientists are forced to specialize too early. He defends that people walk around with the world's knowledge in their phones without the ability to integrate it.
Enabling people to cooperate and move between departments enables people to reframe problems in different ways.
Brian Uzzi calls Human Creativity "Import/export business of ideas". Scientists that worked abroad are more likely to make contributions with more impact.
Read far outside your field
We pursue "tiger" paths because they are low on uncertainty and high on efficiency. Experimentation is slow. But it's a path to success.
Conclusion
Don't feel behind
Compare yourself to yourself yesterday. You probably don't even know where exactly you're going.
Plan experiments - be a scientists of yourself
Assorted final thoughts
-This book stands opposed to the idea of the Pin Factory by Adam Smith.
-This books connects really well the Charlie Munger's main life thesis:
Whatever you do in life, regardless of the work/life balance, it's a mistake to not acquire wordly wisdom. It will make you better in every way.
-Committees have a bad rep (Steve Jobs was a well known hater of committees), but if you're able to do this it could work
Have a diverse background of attendees
Foster creativity through incentivized use of analogies
Adapt culture to be incongruent (individualized + process oriented)
-I'm frankly displeased at the lack of opposing studies. I’d love to have read more about counter points to being a generalist.