David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (2019) was mentioned in a recent telephone call among leadership educators so I chose to pick it up to determine its relevance to our work. Epstein traced the origin of the book to a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell who advocates in his writing that special gifts have to be pursued doggedly and with ultimately 10,000 hours of persistent study in order to pay off. Gladwell’s thesis is not undone by Epstein but expanded, with Epstein proposing that genius comes from exploring many different, and often unrelated, ideas and then integrating in creative ways across diverse fields.
The book started by comparing the sports careers of Roger Federer versus Tiger Woods. Their paths to athletic greatness were very different with Federer exploring multiple sports before settling on tennis while Woods pursued golf and only golf from a very early age. “Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success – and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible” (locator, page 6, Introduction). However, the contrasting “slow bakers” perspective suggests that elite athletes exhibit lower intensity in focus in their early years and then rocket past their high intensity competitors around age fifteen.
Citing examples from high performers in diverse fields such as chess champions, musicians, and scientists, Epstein provided evidence that postponing decisions about giftedness indeed contributed to more genius. In addition to the fact that postponing the pursuit of exceptional mastery resulted in greater creative contributions in the end, Epstein cited research that “scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation” and that these outside interests are even more pronounced among Nobel Prize winners (locator, page 32, Chapter 1). Applying knowledge by creative adaptation in another pursuit is key in order to avoid entrenchment of one’s ideas. This kind of creativity is grounded in ‘abstract thinking’ that requires the ability to shift in categories and conceptual frameworks or even better in ‘analogical thinking’ that involves “recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common” (locator, page 102, Chapter 5).
Epstein referenced research indicating that one of the most common paths to exceptionality in musical performance begins with sampling that is complemented by learning several instruments. Like breadth in music, highly credentialed experts in other fields can stay at top performance levels by not becoming too narrow in focus, a condition that can lead to decline with advanced experience. Truly gifted break-through creatives tend to learn at a slower pace, allowing for the gradual accumulation of deep and integrative learning based on more challenging and frustrating problems. With jazz composition/performance and Dave Brubeck the example, Epstein described Brubeck’s mother’s unsuccessful attempt to teach him to play piano by reading notes. The youthful Brubeck chose instead to improvise and didn’t learn to read music until declaring himself a music major as a senior in college. For Brubeck, the complex problem of mixing instruments and performers in the spontaneous act of improvisation was something for which formal training could only provide tools, rather than the genius of creativity.
The challenge of living into Epstein’s thesis of gradual and integrative learning is that we live in a time that incentivizes hyperspecialization that begins as early as possible and narrows quickly before we are mature enough to judge our interests and talents. With three-quarters of American university graduates pursuing careers unrelated to their majors, there is clear evidence that focusing on specialization fails to prepare many for what they will “do” in life. By contrast, education in the modern, complex world we inhabit would perhaps be more meaningful and effective by cultivating playful, exploratory, and reproducible insights in creative learners, attributes that result in “mental meandering and personal experimentation as sources of power” (locator, page 290, Conclusion).
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