Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.

As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. (Think about the lab with only E. coli specialists from chapter 5.) If those fail, they’re stuck. For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a domain-b

Naifeh and Smith used an elegant phrase to describe Van Gogh’s pliable passions: his “altered gospel.” The Grit Scale statement “I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest” is Van Gogh in a nutshell, at least up until the final few years of his life when he settled on his unique style and creatively

The powerful lesson is that anything in the world can be conquered in the same way. It relies on one very important, and very unspoken, assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of all the activities that matter to you.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.

functional fixedness.

I remember nothing about stoichiometry, but I use Fermi thinking regularly, breaking down a problem so I can leverage what little I know to start investigating what I don’t, a “similarities” problem of sorts.

there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure.