DAVID. EPSTEIN

'David Epstein manages to make me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved Range.' - Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Outliers. Range is the ground-breaking and exhilarating exploration into how to be successful in the 21st Century, from David Epstein the acclaimed author of The Sports Gene. What if everything you have been taught about how to succeed in life was wrong? From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many hours of deliberate practice. And, worse, that if you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong. In this landmark book, David Epstein shows that the way to excel is by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly, juggling many interests - in other words, by developing range. Studying the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, and scientists Epstein discovered that in most fields - especially those that are complex and unpredictable - generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. They are also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see. Range proves that by spreading your knowledge across multiple domains is the key to success rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range explains how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience and interdisciplinary thinking in a world that increasingly demands, hyper-specialization.

How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Range

Kunal Mishra

Cassandra Tang

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.

Premodern people miss the forest for the tress; modern people miss the trees for the forest.

… a city dweller travelling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive, so long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.

Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.

Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility. It its the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.

The frog’e eye view of individual parts is not enough. A healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity.

Be careful not to be too careful or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a difference rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind does’t help.

Range quotes

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