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![Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by [David J. Epstein]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41-nFxo5yTL._SY346_.jpg)
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Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World Kindle Edition
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“I love this idea [Range], because I think of myself as a jack of all trades.” — Fareed Zakaria, CNN
“The storytelling is so dramatic, the wielding of data so deft and the lessons so strikingly framed that it’s never less than a pleasure to read. . . . a wealth of thought-provoking material.” —New York Times Book Review
“Range is a convincing, engaging survey of research and anecdotes that confirm a thoughtful, collaborative world is also a better and more innovative one.” —NPR
“For reasons I cannot explain, David Epstein manages to make me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved Range.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and The Tipping Point
“It’s a joy to spend hours in the company of a writer as gifted as David Epstein. And the joy is all the greater when that writer shares so much crucial and revelatory information about performance, success, and education.” — Susan Cain, author of Quiet
“For too long, we’ve believed in a single path to excellence. Start early, specialize soon, narrow your focus, aim for efficiency. But in this groundbreaking book, David Epstein shows that in most domains, the way to excel is something altogether different. Sample widely, gain a breadth of experiences, take detours, and experiment relentlessly. Epstein is a deft writer, equally nimble at telling a great story and unpacking complicated science. And Range is an urgent and important book, an essential read for bosses, parents, coaches, and anyone who cares about improving performance.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of When, Drive, and A Whole New Mind
“In a world that’s increasingly obsessed with specialization, star science writer David Epstein is here to convince you that the future may belong to generalists. It’s a captivating read that will leave you questioning the next steps in your career—and the way you raise your children.” —Adam Grant, author of Give and Take and Originals
“Range is a blueprint for a more thoughtful, collaborative world – and it’s also really fun to read.” —NPR, Best Books of 2019
“I want to give Range to any kid who is being forced to take violin lessons—but really wants to learn the drums; to any programmer who secretly dreams of becoming a psychologist; to everyone who wants humans to thrive in an age of robots. Range is full of surprises and hope, a 21st century survival guide.” —Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World.
“An assiduously researched and accessible argument for being a jack of all trades.” —O Magazine, Best Nonfiction Books Coming in 2019
“Range elevates Epstein to one of the very best science writers at work today. The scope of the book—and the implications—are breathtaking. I find myself applying what I've learned to almost every aspect of my life.” —Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe, War, and The Perfect Storm
“A goldmine of surprising insights. Makes you smarter with every page.” —James Clear, New York Times best-selling author of Atomic Habits
“Range will force you to rethink the nature of learning, thinking, and being, and reconsider what you thought you knew about optimal education and career paths—and how and why the most successful people in the world do what they do. It's one of the most thought-provoking and enlightening books I've read.” —Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind and The Confidence Game, professional poker player
“A fresh, brisk look at creativity, learning, and the meaning of achievement.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Brilliant, timely, and utterly impossible to put down. If you care about improving skill, innovation, and performance, you need to read this book. ” —Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code and The Talent Code
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Cult of the Head Start
One year and four days after World War II in Europe ended in unconditional surrender, Laszlo Polgar was born in a small town in Hungary-the seed of a new family. He had no grandmothers, no grandfathers, and no cousins; all had been wiped out in the Holocaust, along with his father's first wife and five children. Laszlo grew up determined to have a family, and a special one.
He prepped for fatherhood in college by poring over biographies of legendary thinkers, from Socrates to Einstein. He decided that traditional education was broken, and that he could make his own children into geniuses, if he just gave them the right head start. By doing so, he would prove something far greater: that any child can be molded for eminence in any discipline. He just needed a wife who would go along with the plan.
Laszlo's mother had a friend, and the friend had a daughter, Klara. In 1965, Klara traveled to Budapest, where she met Laszlo in person. Laszlo didn't play hard to get; he spent the first visit telling Klara that he planned to have six children and that he would nurture them to brilliance. Klara returned home to her parents with a lukewarm review: she had "met a very interesting person," but could not imagine marrying him.
They continued to exchange letters. They were both teachers and agreed that the school system was frustratingly one-size-fits-all, made for producing "the gray average mass," as Laszlo put it. A year and a half of letters later, Klara realized she had a very special pen pal. Laszlo finally wrote a love letter, and proposed at the end. They married, moved to Budapest, and got to work. Susan was born in early 1969, and the experiment was on.
For his first genius, Laszlo picked chess. In 1972, the year before Susan started training, American Bobby Fischer defeated Russian Boris Spassky in the "Match of the Century." It was considered a Cold War proxy in both hemispheres, and chess was suddenly pop culture. Plus, according to Klara, the game had a distinct benefit: "Chess is very objective and easy to measure." Win, lose, or draw, and a point system measures skill against the rest of the chess world. His daughter, Laszlo decided, would become a chess champion.
Laszlo was patient, and meticulous. He started Susan with "pawn wars." Pawns only, and the first person to advance to the back row wins. Soon, Susan was studying endgames and opening traps. She enjoyed the game and caught on quickly. After eight months of study, Laszlo took her to a smoky chess club in Budapest and challenged grown men to play his four-year-old daughter, whose legs dangled from her chair. Susan won her first game, and the man she beat stormed off. She entered the Budapest girls' championship and won the under-eleven title. At age four she had not lost a game.
By six, Susan could read and write and was years ahead of her grade peers in math. Laszlo and Klara decided they would educate her at home and keep the day open for chess. The Hungarian police threatened to throw him in jail if he did not send his daughter to the compulsory school system. It took him months of lobbying the Ministry of Education to gain permission. Susan's new little sister, Sofia, would be homeschooled too, as would Judit, who was coming soon, and whom Laszlo and Klara almost named Zseni, Hungarian for "genius." All three became part of the grand experiment.
On a normal day, the girls were at the gym by 7 a.m. playing table tennis with trainers, and then back home at 10:00 for breakfast, before a long day of chess. When Laszlo reached the limit of his expertise, he hired coaches for his three geniuses in training. He spent his extra time cutting two hundred thousand records of game sequences from chess journals-many offering a preview of potential opponents-and filing them in a custom card catalog, the "cartotech." Before computer chess programs, it gave the Polgars the largest chess database in the world to study outside of-maybe-the Soviet Union's secret archives.
When she was seventeen, Susan became the first woman to qualify for the men's world championship, although the world chess federation did not allow her to participate. (A rule that would soon be changed, thanks to her accomplishments.) Two years later, in 1988, when Sofia was fourteen and Judit twelve, the girls comprised three of the four Hungarian team members for the women's Chess Olympiad. They won, and beat the Soviet Union, which had won eleven of the twelve Olympiads since the event began. The Polgar sisters became "national treasures," as Susan put it. The following year, communism fell, and the girls could compete all over the world. In January 1991, at the age of twenty-one, Susan became the first woman to achieve grandmaster status through tournament play against men. In December, Judit, at fifteen years and five months, became the youngest grandmaster ever, male or female. When Susan was asked on television if she wanted to win the world championship in the men's or women's category, she cleverly responded that she wanted to win the "absolute category."
None of the sisters ultimately reached Laszlo's highest goal of becoming the overall world champion, but all were outstanding. In 1996, Susan participated in the women's world championship, and won. Sofia peaked at the rank of international master, a level down from grandmaster. Judit went furthest, climbing up to eighth in the overall world ranking in 2004.
Laszlo's experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990s he suggested that if his early specialization approach were applied to a thousand children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS. After all, chess was just an arbitrary medium for his universal point. Like the Tiger Woods story, the Polgar story entered an endless pop culture loop in articles, books, TV shows, and talks as an example of the life-hacking power of an early start. An online course called "Bring Up Genius!" advertises lessons in the Polgar method to "build up your own Genius Life Plan." The bestseller Talent Is Overrated used the Polgar sisters and Tiger Woods as proof that a head start in deliberate practice is the key to success in "virtually any activity that matters to you."
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.
Just how much of the world, and how many of the things humans want to learn and do, are really like chess and golf?
Product details
- ASIN : B07H1ZYWTM
- Publisher : Riverhead Books (May 28, 2019)
- Publication date : May 28, 2019
- Language : English
- File size : 2410 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 351 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,162 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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The book does not disappoint. Epstein emphasizes that even though stories like those of golfer Tiger Woods and the chess-master Polgar sisters get all the attention, real life just isn't like golf or chess. Those activities happen in "kind" environments, where rules are few, goals are simple, and progress is easy to measure. Real life operates in the "wicked" domain, where rules are myriad, goals change, and there is no simple measure of progress. In complex environments, those whose brains have trained to deal with a lot of different situations -- i.e. the generalists -- perform a lot better.
In addition to a recap of the science of learning and expertise, Epstein digs up valuable nuggets from the literature on improved problem-solving, the proper fit between talent and career, and optimizing education for versatility. I also loved the stories of the unsung badasses that I'd heard little of, like three-time accidental CEO Frances Hesselbein, and the "figlie del coro" multi-instrumental virtuoso women of baroque-era Venice.
This is a great book and a fun, quick, well-written read. Take heart, ye restless career-hoppers, that many if not most people operating at the highest levels of human accomplishment -- rafts of Nobelists, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Roger Federer -- were generalists who got a relatively late start at their metier and achieved greatness not in spite of it, but because of it. So keep on exploring.
-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible , the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine
Diverse sources
Returning to “Range,” the author is very wide-ranging. He refers to dozens of books that I have read over the past couple years. In fact, you could read “Range” as a kid of frame for others. I wonder, however, if I would have gotten the same benefit from “Range” had I been less familiar with books like “Peak,” “Grit,” “Late Bloomers,” “Where Good Ideas Come From” or “Super Forecasters,” among others.
The advantage of borrowing
The author freely borrows ideas from all those, which is part of the main theme of the book. Lot of ideas are out there. Generalists find them, compile them and put them into new context. Discovering is important; assembling is too. Generally, assemblers are responsible for more effective innovation.
Innovation cannot be created directly; else it would not be innovation. Epstein encourages lateral thinking and that is best accomplished by broad knowledge and broad contacts. Recall that innovation is not the same as invention. Innovation involves using new inventions but more often by applying existing – sometimes very prosaic – factors in new ways.
Foxes & hedgehogs
Epstein uses the old Izaiah Berlin metaphor of hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs know one thing very deeply; foxes know lots of things but not in detail. Both sorts are necessary. Hedgehogs develop inventions and ideas. Foxes assemble. In settled or limited situations, hedgehogs do better, since they can apply bodies of knowledge and experience. This is where grit pays off. MOST of life is like this. If this was not true, there would be little use in any sort of professional expertise or practice. When board a commercial airline, we hope the pilot and crew do NOT need to innovate, that they will follow well-known and established procedures. The division of labor works and innovation can be overrated.
In new or uncertain situations, however, it is the foxes that excel. Foxes beat hedgehogs consistently when trying to predict uncertain events. Epstein mentions the work of Phillip Tetlock, who did a multi-decade study of experts in political pundits. He found that the experts were no better than random chance in predicting big political events out more than a short time or innovations. In fact, the specialists were often WORST in their own specialties, and the most famous were often worst of all. (I recall this from when the Soviet Union fell. Nobody predicted this, although some have now implied that they did.) Tetlock (and Epstein) speculate that the reason is that famous pundits get famous by making radical predictions and then not backing down when they are wrong. They can also tell better stories. Those experts are hedgehogs.
The foxes do much better because they are willing to listen to broad and new information and to change their minds. Theirs is a more iterative procedure, incorporating new information as available and a willingness to “flip-flop” when it makes sense.
Is grit overrated?
One of the things I liked a lot about the book was that it was wide ranging, but that means that the story line is something a little tangential. Epstein spends a lot of time talking about grit and persistence. He is not against it but says it may be overrated. This is especially true for young people. They have to make commitments to studies or career before they know themselves, before their personalities are formed. It might be a bad fit. Sometimes the best thing you can do is quit and move to something more appropriate.
We tend to double down because of the sunk cost fallacy. The more time or money we spend on something, the less likely we are to abandon it. It is called a fallacy because that is exactly what it is. Even if you spend $1 million on something, if the payoff from additional investment does not pay off, the sunk cost does not matter.
It reads more logically than it was lived
His closing advice is that you have to experiment and try lots of things. Epstein points out that the stories we tell of success and innovation tend to be more orderly than the reality. It is the narrative fallacy. It is hard to tell as story w/o a narrative, which explains it. Stories are more logical and plausible than reality.
I recommend the book. It is well written and the themes appropriately diverse. My only complaint is one I have for almost all such books. They include too many personal stories. They are kind of larded into books. I cynically think they are there to make the book long and heavy enough to be taken seriously, but I suppose readers like the human stories. My problem is that lots of the authors use the same stories or at least the same people. As I wrote, I read a lot of these sorts of books and I have heard many of them before.
Top reviews from other countries


It is important to do a sampling a range of related things in your field before you choose a specialisation. It helps to develop an overall competence so that the skills learnt in other fields act as an added advantage and boost your final skill in your chosen field. Also, you will know which field suits you the best and for which you have a passion which will help you in the long term to achieve excellence on par with the best in the world.
The age of sampling should be typically between 6 to 16. In these formative years you can experiment freely and as your body is flexible and ur brain plastic, you can learn many skills naturally.
Thirdly, not all specialisation needs sampling and range. For eg Golf, Chess and Coding need a lot of practice and pattern recognition rather than different set of skills. So, in such fields u can simply go for a specialisation without wasting time on sampling period.

Unfortunately at around 100 pages or so - Chapter 5 or thereabouts - the quality of writing deteriorated significantly with normal conventions on grammar and punctuation seemingly ignored. I gave up soon after that as the writing became so disjointed and irritating.
I tried dipping in to later chapters and the quality of writing had seemed to improve but there was so much rambling that by the time the point of each description had been reached I didn't care.
I was disappointed since I have long been a believer in what was said in the early pages but the book just didn't do it justice.

This book is about getting range, not depth – at least not too quickly. Citing the works of Daniel Kahneman, Philip Tetlock, and many others, Epstein proffered the view that it is better to be the fox that knows many things rather than the hedgehog who only knows one big thing.
In science, Epstein, citing James Flynn, noted that, ‘students learned the facts of their specific field without understanding how science should work in order to draw true conclusions’. ‘One good tool is rarely enough’ he writes, ‘in a complex, interconnected rapidly changing world’. Epstein, however, is not against specialization, but is voicing thoughts of a wider range.

Range is a very welcome antidote - well argued and looking at a range of research as well as illustrative stories: offsetting Tiger Woods with Federer or the German Football team, creativity in science, mastery of multiple instruments.
I was fascinated to read for example how Darwin was a massive collaborator, not just the barnacle super-specialist I had assumed; or the struggles of Kepler as he reached to conceive of new possibilities.
A really good book, and I hope it has the impact it deserves.
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