Range, David Epstein

I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind. (Location 202)

Learning about the advantages of breadth and delayed specialization has changed the way I see myself and the world. (Location 239)

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization. (Location 242)

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. (Location 465)

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds. (Location 479)

doctors and nurses do not automatically find out what happens to a patient after their encounter. They have to find ways to learn beyond practice, and to assimilate lessons that might even contradict their direct experience. (Location 500)

Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation. (Location 520)

“To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.” (Location 525)

Flynn’s great disappointment is the degree to which society, and particularly higher education, has responded to the broadening of the mind by pushing specialization, rather than focusing early training on conceptual, transferable knowledge. (Location 715)

if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife. (Location 755)

brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them. Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. (Location 1133)

When younger students bring home problems that force them to make connections, Richland told me, “parents are like, ‘Lemme show you, there’s a faster, easier way.’” If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem. (Location 1271)

“training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.” (Location 1314)

All forces align to incentivize a head start and early, narrow specialization, even if that is a poor long-term strategy. That is a problem, because another kind of knowledge, perhaps the most important of all, is necessarily slowly acquired—the kind that helps you match yourself to the right challenge in the first place. (Location 1805)

Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit. (Location 1959)

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. (Location 2045)

with more knowledge of their skills and preferences, choosing to pursue a different goal was no longer the gritless route; it was the smart one. (Location 2116)

according to Seth Godin, quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. (Location 2159)

It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning. (Location 2192)

“I was unaware that I was being prepared,” she told me. “I did not intend to become a leader, I just learned by doing what was needed at the time.” (Location 2283)

“The people we study who are fulfilled do pursue a long-term goal, but they only formulate it after a period of discovery,” he told me. “Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with getting a law or medical degree or PhD. But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed. People realize things about themselves halfway through medical school.” (Location 2321)

Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. (Location 2337)

we learn who we are only by living, and not before. Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat. (Location 2411)

Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.” (Location 2441)

“I know who I am when I see what I do.” (Location 2469)

A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.” (Location 2543)

Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available. (Location 2642)

“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.” (Location 2675)

The specialists were adept at working for a long time on difficult technical problems, and for anticipating development obstacles. The generalists tended to get bored working in one area for too long. They added value by integrating domains, taking technology from one area and applying it in others. (Location 3050)

She is a “T-shaped person,” she said, one who has breadth, compared to an “I-shaped person,” who only goes deep, an analog to Dyson’s birds and frogs. “T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,” she told me. “My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. (Location 3103)

In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly. Surgical teams work faster and make fewer mistakes as they repeat specific procedures, and specialized surgeons get better outcomes even independent of repetitions. If you need to have surgery, you want a doctor who specializes in the procedure and has done it many times, preferably with the same team, just as you would want Tiger Woods to step in if your life was on the line for a ten-foot putt. They’ve been there, many times, and now have to re-create a well-understood process that they have executed successfully before. (Location 3159)

You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.” (Location 4125)

To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. (Location 4204)

“What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.” (Location 4272)

So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind. (Location 4319)