A review by deagaric
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often-times better than a master of one."
Interesting how we often just take out the last part of famous phrases and misconstrue the overall meaning entirely. Epstein beautifully illustrates a relatively novel generalize-rather-than-specialize perspective on approaching one's career and skill-building as a whole. This proposal goes against many of the commonly praised ideologies, such as the 10,000-hours rule and Duckworth's Grit perspective that encourages perseverance, by instead saying to not put your eggs in one basket, be multi-disciplinary regardless of the short-term costs, and know when to quit and move on.
Higher education is openly geared towards over-specialization, so I was put off by Epstein's perspective in the first few chapters, but he builds upon his reasoning with many detailed real-world examples and provides very compelling evidence.
One section I particularly enjoyed was Chapter 4, where Epstein does an engaging deep dive into approaches for learning and education. He introduces Kornell's concept of "desirable difficulties", where a learning process that is challenging, slow, and frustrating tends to lead to better concept comprehension in the long-run compared to learning approaches that are faster and more 'hint-based'. Generating wrong answers time in and time out before finally get it right, while anger-inducing, is extremely beneficial for learning and memory, and this is rarely discussed in many other books.
As the book progresses, Epstein makes it clear that the point is not to blindly avoid specialization at all costs, but rather to not let it get in the way of cognitive flexibility and to allow yourself to pursue skills and knowledge from a wide variety of sources, even if it may not be applicable to the current situation at hand. Further, you can combine the advantages of specialists and generalists through teamwork. Freeman Dyson had a nice analogy for this; birds fly high and have a 'big picture' point of view, frogs are in the mud and can see the details of their surroundings very clearly. One is not better than the other; building teams of 'birds' and 'frogs' allow the problem to be examined both broadly and deeply.
The book wraps up very nicely and makes for an interesting and highly insightful read.
Interesting how we often just take out the last part of famous phrases and misconstrue the overall meaning entirely. Epstein beautifully illustrates a relatively novel generalize-rather-than-specialize perspective on approaching one's career and skill-building as a whole. This proposal goes against many of the commonly praised ideologies, such as the 10,000-hours rule and Duckworth's Grit perspective that encourages perseverance, by instead saying to not put your eggs in one basket, be multi-disciplinary regardless of the short-term costs, and know when to quit and move on.
Higher education is openly geared towards over-specialization, so I was put off by Epstein's perspective in the first few chapters, but he builds upon his reasoning with many detailed real-world examples and provides very compelling evidence.
One section I particularly enjoyed was Chapter 4, where Epstein does an engaging deep dive into approaches for learning and education. He introduces Kornell's concept of "desirable difficulties", where a learning process that is challenging, slow, and frustrating tends to lead to better concept comprehension in the long-run compared to learning approaches that are faster and more 'hint-based'. Generating wrong answers time in and time out before finally get it right, while anger-inducing, is extremely beneficial for learning and memory, and this is rarely discussed in many other books.
As the book progresses, Epstein makes it clear that the point is not to blindly avoid specialization at all costs, but rather to not let it get in the way of cognitive flexibility and to allow yourself to pursue skills and knowledge from a wide variety of sources, even if it may not be applicable to the current situation at hand. Further, you can combine the advantages of specialists and generalists through teamwork. Freeman Dyson had a nice analogy for this; birds fly high and have a 'big picture' point of view, frogs are in the mud and can see the details of their surroundings very clearly. One is not better than the other; building teams of 'birds' and 'frogs' allow the problem to be examined both broadly and deeply.
The book wraps up very nicely and makes for an interesting and highly insightful read.