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

Responding to lived experience with a change of direction, like Van Gogh did habitually, like West Point graduates have been doing since the dawn of the knowledge economy, is less tidy but no less important. It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life st

The higher the domain uncertainty, the more important it was to have a high-breadth team member. As with the molecular biology groups Kevin Dunbar studied that used analogical thinking to solve problems, when the going got uncertain, breadth made the difference.

As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow

The expression “young and foolish,” he wrote, describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. Attempting to be a professiona

No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors. —Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History

“My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all this other knowledge inherently.

solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.

“It’s strange,” Cecchini told me at the end of one of our hours-long discussions, “that some of the greatest musicians were self-taught or never learned to read music. I’m not saying one way is the best, but now I get a lot of students from schools that are teaching jazz, and they all sound the same. They don’t seem to find their own voice. I think