Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Django Reinhardt was once in a taxi with Les Paul, inventor of the solid-body electric guitar. Paul was a self-taught musician, and the only person in both the Rock and Roll and National Inventors halls of fame. Reinhardt tapped Paul on the shoulder and asked if he could read music. “I said no, I didn’t,” Paul recounted, “and he laughed till he was

Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were

In 2019, in a limited version of StarCraft, AI beat a pro for the first time. (The pro adapted and earned a win after a string of losses.) 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 ab

The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost.

To use a common metaphor, premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest.

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

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.

A similar study was conducted at Italy’s Bocconi University, on twelve hundred first-year students who were randomized into introductory course sections in management, economics, or law, and then the courses that followed them in a prescribed sequence over four years. It showed precisely the same pattern. Teachers who guided students to overachieve