Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

and right away asked what training had prepared her for leadership. Wrong question. “Oh, don’t ask me what my training was,” she replied with a dismissing hand wave. She explained that she just did whatever seemed like it would teach her something and allow her to be of service at each moment, and somehow that added up to training. As Steven Naifeh

One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.

Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.

That is head start fervor come full circle; explorers have to pursue such narrowly specialized goals with such hyperefficiency that they can say what they will find before they look for it.

In a study using college math problems, students who learned in blocks—all examples of a particular type of problem at once—performed a lot worse come test time than students who studied the exact same problems but all mixed up. The blocked-practice students learned procedures for each type of problem through repetition. The mixed-practice students

In Flynn’s terms, we now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” He means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another. We have grown up in a world of classification schemes total

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.

He poured his heart out in a missive to his little brother, now a respected art dealer himself. He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so “bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suff