Range: Being future-ready

One of the big questions that all of us must ask is — What’s the fate of the human race in the light of the growing dominance of computers? The corollary is — What would remain uniquely human when computers grow increasingly sophisticated and autonomous? These are important questions, and now we have some useful answers.

In his book, Range, the journalist David Epstein takes a research-backed and practically suggestive approach to advocate the skills of the future and bursts some myths around what it takes to be impactful in life. It’s not easy to write a full-length book on a single idea, the idea of having a range, but Epstein has done a wonderful job here, thanks to his witty and investigative writing style. The book offers the much-needed reassurance to the square-pegs-in-the-round-holes and a nudge to those who are way too careful about how to shape a winning career or raise successful children.

Here’s the book summary in one para:

Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The result can be disastrous. (pp.213)

The core ideas of the book are as follows.

1. A delayed start and versatility isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In contrast, it increases the odds of success in the long run (Roger Federer had a delayed start than Tiger Woods, and results are for all to see).
2. Overspecialization does more harm than good, especially when the problems are ill-defined. It leads to local optima, at best. People who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they process are more likely to succeed in the long run.
3. Wicked problems are best solved by non-experts, and more so with limited experience, as they are more open to exploring alternate routes to solving the problem, entertaining untested ideas. Highly specialized savants aren’t good at solving wicked problems.
4. In the human-machine symbiosis, one must understand Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. Machines are better at handling tactics such that humans can focus on strategy and the big picture.
5. It is increasingly seen that those who make a creative contribution to their field demonstrate aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. They make later transitions into their domain of performance by training broadly and keeping multiple career streams open while pursuing a primary specialty.
6. IQ goes up with every generation, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. It’s because our kids are growing in a more complex world that requires abstract thinking skills. To solve problems they rely less on direct experiences and apply higher levels of “cognitive flexibility”.
7. Self-directed problem solving and nonrepetitive challenges call for a wider range, making connections across far-flung domains and ideas. Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across the disciplines.
8. Most experts are good at learning from experience, but fail to learn without experience. That’s true of chess grandmasters, firefighters, or experts in most narrow fields with relatively know rules and situations.
9. It’s not a bad idea for kids to pick up multiple musical instruments at the start, moving across them and then narrowing them to one at a later time. A significant “sampling period” is important to get to the right “match quality”. The breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer.
10. When teaching kids, let them discover answers, and learn concepts slowly. Allow them to frequently revisiting those concepts as it seems to be a better way of enduring learning. Offering hints or ready answers could severely stunt learning. Offering space between practice sessions can enhance learning, for struggle turns out to be more important than practice. However, interpreting current performance as learning would be wrong.
11. Drawing analogies could be a very powerful means of problem-solving. German astronomer Johannes Kepler adopted analogies to understand the logic of celestial bodies and, in the process, invented astrophysics. Drawing similarities at an abstract level could help generate new insights. The more unusual the challenge, the more distant the analogies, and the more distant the analogy, the better it is for idea generation.
12. In complex, ill-defined problems operating in a wicked world, relying on intuition can be limiting, and even counterproductive. An outsider view can be more helpful than insider expertise, as it helps decision-makers ignore unique surface-level features of the problem and look at structural similarities of situations elsewhere.
13. Often persistence in the face of resistance and difficulty may not be a good idea. Experimenting widely and quitting early before settling on a ‘match quality’ trajectory may be a more advisable method. Switchers may be winners, provided they have sampled sufficiently. It may turn out that choosing to pursue a different goal may not be a gritless route, but instead a smarter one.
14. Short-term planning may be a better approach than blind perseverance. Pivoting often, learning along the way, and settling in late, while may be looked down upon, seems to be the path for an extraordinary number of successful people. It’s true that we learn who we are only by living, and not before. The idea is to “test-and-learn”, and not “plan-and-implement”.
15. To solve complex, ill-defined problems, open up to external experts — the farther the expertise the more radical would be the solution. While we assume that hyperspecialized experts are best suited to drive modern innovations, but increasing specialization actually creates new opportunities for outsiders. A lot more ideas can emerge by tapping into undiscovered public knowledge, which mostly exists at the intersection of disciplines.
16. Polymaths are more adept at solving problems than either specialists or generalists. Polymaths have a depth in a domain or two, along with breadth, the so-called T-shaped people. Polymaths are in a more favorable position than ever before, because communication technology is limiting the number of hyperspecialists required to work on a particular narrow problem.
17. We often find it difficult to drop our well-tried and tested tools even when the situation changes, expectedly. A team with a differentiated chain of command and chain of communication can help unearth incongruencies and thus create the conditions for one to abandon tried and tested tools of problem-solving in search of newer ones.
18. To be creative one needs to remain a “deliberate amateur”. It calls for mental meandering along with the wisdom of deep experience. Such people are more adept at making new connections between existing fields.
19. According to the creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton the more work eminent creators produce, the more duds they churn out, and the higher their chances of supernova success.

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I am also sharing a few incisive quotes from the book, offering you a range of what to expect while reading this well-written piece.

Creativity

Highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident — a dangerous combination. (pp.11)

Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action. (pp.12)

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. (pp.21)

Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures. (pp.96)

Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. (pp.102–103)

Evaluating an array of options before letting intuition reign is a trick for the wicked world. (pp.112)

Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. (pp.115)

Sometimes, the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution. (pp.181)

An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme in research on creative thinkers. (pp.273)

Learning

Most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind. (pp.11)

But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem… Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning… Being forced to generate answers improves subsequent learning even if the generated answer is wrong. (pp.85–86)

Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose. (pp.96)

Knowledge with enduring utility must be very flexible, composed of mental schemes that can be matched to new problems. (pp.98)

Learning stuff is less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education, it is a central benefit. (pp.130)

Man vs Machines

The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. (pp.29)

Human intuition, it appears, is not very well engineered to make use of the best tools when faced with what the researchers called “ill-defined” problems… In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous. (pp.106–107)

Career management

Finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way. (pp.143)

Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts. (pp.160)

Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow. (pp.206)

Organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to adopt them. (pp.255)

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 smash hit in the library of human knowledge. (pp.282)

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. (pp.290)

Mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated. (pp.291)