Range by David Epstein

1. The old notion of getting ahead in life by specializing early is becoming less relevant.
2. The new world is full of "wicked" problems - not easily solved by formulas. So we need to be taught how to think.
3. Breadth is more important than depth with learning how to think and solve wicked problems.

Cult of the Head Start

• Old wisdom argues that early specialization is how you get ahead
• Tiger vs. Roger
• Chinese parenting
• Made sense in the past, but the world is different now.

• Specialization is still important, but breadth is becoming increasingly valuable, even as the world keeps revere for hyperspecialization
• Freeman Dyson: birds & frogs
• Experienced practitioners can often display learned inflexibility (cognitive entrenchment), inability to adapt.

• Characteristics of people with range:
• Domain knowledge transfer (avoid entrenchment)
• Can draw on outside experiences + analogies for creative solutions
• Avoid or lack reliance on same old patterns

How the Wicked World was Made

• Flynn effect: as a species, we seem to be getting smarter
• We use classification schemes. Older generations did not.
• Ebbinghaus illusion

• Modern times calls for conceptual understanding vs. perceptive understanding
• Knowledge transfer
• Exposure to modern work, self directive & non-repetitive was associated with being cognitively flexible
• Conceptual understanding provides scaffolding for future knowledge

• Kind domains vs. Wicked domains
• Kind: structured, rewards repeat procedural skill, feedback is immediate, accurate. Examples: chess, sports & other situations where pattern recognition serves well.
• Wicked: ambiguous, unstructured, may or may not have repetitive patterns, repeat procedural skill not rewarded. Feedback can be delayed, inaccurate or both.

• Instead of procedures, we must be taught how to think.
• Need to adopt the metaphorical Swiss Army knife when approaching challenging problems.
• Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines
• No tool is omnicompetent

• Fermi problems
• Using existing knowledge + concepts to break complex problems down
• How many piano tuners are in NY?

When Less of the Same is More

• A head start is not a pre-requisite to mastery. Breadth of sampling appears to be a better predictor. We need sampling periods.
• Even distribution among 3 instruments - start wide then narrow & blow up volume
• Liking an instrument more + being good at it drive interest.
• This matters for direction setting.

• Self directed experimentation resulting in learning in a variety of contexts which creates better abstract models for understanding, and less reliance on any one particular mode.
• The result is greater flexibility in knowledge application to unknown situations, the essence of creativity.

Learning, Fast & Slow

• Pedagogical approaches: procedural vs. connection
• Procedure requires practice something that was learned, trying to find rules via deduction
• Connections requires student to explain a broader concept - why does it work?

• Brain tries to use few resources - keep this in mind when thinking about learning
• Difficulty is a key primer for good learning.
• Hint-giving and guide does the opposite, like a drug

• Generation effect - generating an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances learning.
• So testing is a good way to learn, including self-testing, even prior to study when failure is assured
• Trying primes the brain to learn. Retrieval is about the journey.

• Distributed practice - distributing over time w/ spaced intervals is more effective than fewer, concentrated, long sessions for learning
• Spacing effect - better encoding w/ disturbed practice intervals, “space makes it easy to make it hard”

• Block vs. interleaving practice
• Blocked = studying single thing repeatedly.
• Interleaving = mixing multiple things together to study in tandem (e.g. study Picasso, intermix Renoir and others)
• Interleaving helps with identifying different types of problems, improves ability to match right strategy to a problem vs. procedural memorization

• So in sum, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run
• Feeling of learning is based on progress before your eyes, deep learning is not.
• So intuition says block learning is better, but testing says it’s not. Your feelings deceive you.
• Testing and leaving makes knowledge stick. Making connections and Interleaving makes knowledge flexible. All slow down learning, but teach ti search for deep structural commonalities among problems.

Thinking Outside Experience

• To transfer among domains, analogs are great.
• Deep analogical thinking - the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.
• Powerful tool for solving wicked problems.
• Kepler - how he developed laws of planetary motion. Analogies are all he had.

• Duckner’s radiation problem (tumor)
• Give them the stories alongside, they figure it out (fortress battle, firefighting)

• Inside view vs. Outside view
• Inside - when we make judgments based narrowly on the details of the project that are right in front of us
• Outside - when we probe for deep structural similarities of current problem in different ones
• Outside is counterintuitive because you have to ignore surface features, switch to broad mindset

• Cognitive bias: the more internal details you have to consider (inside view), the more extreme your judgment becomes (VC firms).
• Actively being told to analog drives more creative solutions. The broader the analog instruction, the better the solutions.

• Therefore, optimal analogies are not close but distant. Moreover, many should be employed/explored.
• Not just singular, superficial or obvious ones.
• “A problem well put is half-solved”

The Trouble with Too Much Grit

• A lot of info about finding your fit (match quality, Van Gogh, value of late starts)
• The predictiveness of grit (e.g. West Point cadets) may not look the same in less restricted populations
• Knowing when to quit is a big strategic advantage. Enumerate conditions of quitting before undertaking something.
• The important trick is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure or perseverance or astute recognition that better matches are available.

Flirting With Your Possible Selves

• Dark Horse Project - long term study showing many people achieve success on circuitous career path vs linear
• Short term planning - common strategy from those participants
• Here’s who I am at the moment, my motivations, what I like to do, what I want to learn, my opportunities
• Long term goals only formulated after lengthy periods of discovery

• End of history illusion
• Dan Gilbert: ability to comprehend personal change in the past, but inability to convince we will change in the future
• The person you are now is fleeting, just like all others you’ve been

• Context principle - traits are not uniformly applied across different context.
• Child aggressive at home, passive at school
• Instead of asking if someone is gritty, ask when they are.

• Because we change more than we expect, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals.
• First act, then think. We discover possibilities by doing, trying new stuff, building new frameworks, finding new role models.

• In sum, rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. Test and learn, not plan and implement.

The Outsider Advantage

• Eli Lilly’s Bingham posted problems to Internet and received great creative useful ideas from outsiders.
• He observed we tend to approach problems with local search (specialists from single domain, solutions that worked before), proposed Outside-in thinking for finding solutions far outside traditional training / methods.
• InnoCentive: the further a problem was from solver’s expertise, the more likely they solve it

• Einstellung effect ****predisposition to solve a problem in a certain way despite better methods being available. Cognitive tunneling, focus too narrow
• To a hammer, everything looks like a nail (Jeff)

• Karim Lakhani: “Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.”
• Domingos: Knowledge is double-edged - allows you to do some things, but makes you blind to other things you could do

Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

• Story of Yokoi with Nintendo
• Chapter title is reference to his strategy: reimagination & recombination of existing tech & info in new contexts.
• A way to draw together disparate ideas into a fresh new product
• Lateral thinking: recombination of ideas from different domains
• Withered tech: old, cheap, ubiquitous, well-understood
• Example: LCD calculators + handheld games

• Functional fixedness - tendency to consider only familiar uses for objects
• Candle problem (candle, box of tacks, matches)

• 3 types of inventors according to Ouderkirk @ 3M
• Specialists: adept at working on difficult technical problems for a long time
• Generalists: add value by integrating domains, taking tech from one area & applying to others. Get bored with depth.
• Polymaths: broad range w/ at least 1 area of depth, hybrid of two.
• Well defined, well understood problems? Specialists. Ambiguous and uncertain? Generalists.

Fooled by Expertise

• Story of bet about earth running out of food. One won, but both were wrong. No correlation on metal prices.
• Variable both were certain would vindicate them had little relevance

• Experts are terrible forecasters of the future

• Take facts from them, not opinions.
• Integrators (combine thinking from leading experts & synthesize into integrated approach) are better forecasters

• Tetlock: hedgehogs and foxes
• Hedgehogs know 1 big thing, foxes know many little things
• Good Judgment Project: foxes from the public outperform intelligence analysts, top super-forecasters are expert collaborators and reinforce group dynamic creating sum greater than parts

• Best forecasters view their ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Encourage teammates to help them falsify their own notions (contrary to confirmation bias). Science curiosity.

• Confirmation bias at play
• We have strong instinct not to come up with different ideas from our existing one
• We don’t spend time exploring why we’re wrong or coming up with contrary ideas
• Good judges are good belief updaters.

Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools

• Carter Racing & NASA analog
• We often just use data in front of us, rather than saying “Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?”

• Real problem at NASA was too much focus on quantitative though
• A qualitative assessment could have saved Challenger, but culture didn’t allow for that
• People are rigid under pressure, regress to what they know for comfort, try to bend unfamiliar situation to create comfort
• Feynman: “When you don’t have any data, you have to use reason.”

• Effective problem solving culture is one with incongruence
• Balance standard practices w/ forces that push in opposite direction
• Used to process conformity? Encourage individualism. Improvising? Process loyalty.
• Best results from identifying dominant culture & pushing in opposite direction for ambidextrous thought.
• Chain of command? Chain of communication

Deliberate Amateurs

• “Enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is recurring theme in research on creative thinkers”
• “Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try new skills.”
• Friday night experiments led to Nobel Prize winning discovery
• Principle of limited sloppiness: don’t be too careful or you will unconsciously limit your exploration

• Exploratory interests are being funded less, less interest because of lack of vision & efficiency
• These are building blocks for future breakthroughs though (HIV)
• Casadevall: “When you push the boundaries, a lot of it is just probing. It has to be inefficient.”

Conclusion:

• Epstein’s one sentence of advice: “Don’t feel behind - compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you.”
• “Mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.”

Unorganized but Important Notes

• Successful problem solvers are more able to perceive deep structure of a problem before matching a strategy to it.
• People can identify domains but not as good at identifying structure
• Many study groups showing broad experiences innovating, value in ambiguous domains per below

💡 Serial innovators, high tolerance for ambiguity, systems thinkers, peripheral knowledge from other domains, repurposing what is already available, adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process, ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways, synthesizing information from many different sources, flip among ideas, broad range of interests, read more and more broadly than other technologists and wider range of outside interests, need to learn significantly across multiple domains, need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.

• Sarah Lewis (art historian): “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun.”
• “Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to experience. In middle age, adults grow more consistent and cautious and less curious, open-minded, and inventive.”
• “The atypical combination of typical forms—say hip-hop, a Broadway musical, and American historical biography [e.g. Hamilton]—is not a strategy fluke of showbiz.”
• “Work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

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