Range - David Epstein

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ONLY THE STUPID AND THE DEAD DON'T CHANGE THEIR MIND.

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EXPERTS OFTEN JUDGE THEIR OWN FIELDS MORE NARROWLY THAN OPEN-MINDED, INTELLECTUALLY CURIOUS AMATEURS DO.

STARTING EARLY AND SPECIALIZING IS FASHIONABLE BUT HAS DUBIOUS MERIT.

At the age of ten months old, Tiger Woods picked up his first miniature golf club. At two, he showed off his golf drive on national television. Later that same year, he entered and won his first tournament in the under ten category.

Tiger Woods embodies a now popular idea that the key to success in life is to specialize, get a head start and practice intensively.

This trend toward specialization does not show only in the sports world. In fact, it is also true for academics, our complex financial system and medicine.

So is specializing the only way forward?

Simply put, ‘NO’.

In many walks of life, building up experience in just one field doesn’t help performance. In a 2009 paper, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein explored the connection between experience and performance.

Klein shows that experience counts in certain fields but does not apply in all areas.

Studying the assessment of officer candidates in the Israeli Defence Forces, he found that recruiters’ predictions of a recruit’s future performance, based on physical and mental abilities were no more reliable than guesswork.

Crucially, as the recruiters received more and more feedback after multiple recruitment rounds, they did not get any better at making predictions. Kahneman concluded that there was a complete disconnect between experience and performance.

There are many more fields of life, like army recruitment, that are much more unformulated and require the creativity and flexibility that generalization offers.

EXPERIMENTATION IS AS RELIABLE A ROUTE TO EXPERTISE AS EARLY SPECIALIZATION.

In 2006, a now 31-year-old Tiger Woods watched Roger Federer win the US Open final for the third year in a row. Both were at the peak of their powers.

As they sipped champagne together in the locker room afterwards, Federer felt he had never connected with someone who understood his feeling of invincibility so well.

They became firm friends. But, as Roger later told a biographer, his story was very different from Tiger’s.

Roger’s mom was a tennis coach, but if she ever felt tempted to coach him, she resisted it.

As a young boy, he dabbled in squash, skiing, wrestling, skateboarding, basketball, tennis and badminton. Later, he gave credit to this range of sports experience for helping his hand-eye coordination and athleticism.

Over time, he moved toward tennis as a teenager, but not intensively. Roger Federer’s winding path to tennis success points to the fact that sampling, rather than specialization, can often be the best route to eventual success.  

And plenty of evidence across multiple disciplines supports this. This is true even in an area like music, where plenty of outstanding musicians do specialize young.

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, for instance, started playing music at a very young age. But what many people don’t know is that Ma first tried violin and piano, and only moved to the cello because he did not like the first two.

In a study of students at a British boarding school, music psychologist John Sloboda found that every one of the students who attended structured music lessons early in their development was categorized by the school as “AVERAGE,” while not one was “EXCEPTIONAL.”

In contrast, those children identified as exceptional were those who had tried out three instruments.

So, if you have not yet found your calling, “EXPERIMENT”. 

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LIVING IN A COMPLEX WORLD HAS INCREASED THE AVERAGE PERSON’S IQ AND ABILITY TO THINK ABSTRACTLY.

In 1981, James Flynn, a professor of political studies from Dunedin in New Zealand, changed the way we think about thinking.

Flynn stumbled upon reports of IQ test scores of American troops that showed dramatic improvement between the two World Wars.

The same score that placed a World War I soldier in the 50th percentile would only land him in the 22nd percentile of World War II troops.

Intrigued, Flynn asked researchers in other countries for data. He received IQ test results from the Netherlands that showed similarly huge leaps from generation to generation. He then compiled data from 14 other nations.

In what’s now known as the Flynn effect, this research reveals an average three-point increase in IQ every decade in over 30 countries. But what causes this rapid rise?

The work of a Russian psychologist, Alexander Luria, gives us an idea.

In 1931, the Soviet Union was changing rapidly. Remote, essentially premodern villages operating in ways unchanged for centuries were converted to collective farms with industrialized development, planned production and division of labour.

Luria used this rate of change to conduct unique studies. In one experiment, he asked villagers to sort wools into groups.

In more modern villages, people would happily group similar pieces of wool, like those indifferent shades of blue.

But in the remote, still premodern villages, participants simply refused to do so. According to them, each piece of wool was different – it was an impossible task!

Other questions involving conceptual thinking got a similar response.

Luria’s findings were clear. The more exposure to modernization, the greater the ability to make conceptual connections between objects or abstract notions.

Today, our minds are constantly dealing with abstract concepts. We glance at a download progress bar on our computer, for example, and instantly understand its meaning.

Our minds are better at understanding a breadth of topics and making connections between ideas than ever before.

And yet, we continue to narrow our conceptual focus.

IF YOU WANT IT TO STICK, LEARNING SHOULD BE SLOW AND HARD, NOT QUICK AND EASY.

A study of teaching at the US Air Force Academy tracked the progress of thousands of students working with hundreds of different professors, starting with Calculus I classes.

It found that the professors whose students’ got better grades on the exam were also highly rated in student evaluations.

The professors whose students did not receive good grades received harsher student feedback.

But when the economists conducting the study looked at long-term results, there was a twist. The professors who received positive feedback had a net negative effect on their students in the long run.

In contrast, those professors who received worse feedback actually inspired better student performance later on.

Rather than teaching for the test, these professors appeared to be facilitating a deeper understanding of underlying math concepts.

It made their classes frustrating and difficult, hence the poor grades and student evaluations. But it paid off in the long run.

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Those professors were using desirable difficulties – harder, but ultimately more rewarding, ways to learn.

There are certain techniques we can all use that embrace desirable difficulties.

One such technique is spacing, which means leaving time between learning something and practising it. Consider a 1987 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

This study separated Spanish students into two groups, testing one group on vocabulary that they had learned the same day, and the other group weeks later.

Eight years later, and with no further study in the interim, the two groups were tested again. The results showed that the latter group could remember over 200 per cent more words.

The process of working hard to recall the information in the first instance had helped them move it from short-term to long-term memory.

So, do not get too excited by quick progress when you learn. Embrace hard, slow learning. It will pay off in the long run.

A BREADTH OF EXPERIENCE AND INTEREST DRIVES INNOVATION.

Comic books can tell us a surprising amount about range and success.

When Dartmouth business professor Alva Taylor and Henrik Greve from the Norwegian School of Management decided to examine the impact of individual breadth on creative impact, they chose to study comics.

Tracking the careers of comic creators and the commercial success of thousands of comic books from 1971 onward, they made some predictions about what would boost the average value of a comic.

They predicted that the more comics a creator made, the better the comics would be. 

Further, they thought that the more resources a publisher had, the higher quality and more successful its product would be.

All these assumptions were wrong. Neither experience nor financial resources bred success. 

What did drive success was the breadth of a comic creator’s experience across comic genres.

The more a creator had worked in a diversified profile, comedy to crime, fantasy to non-fiction, the more successful they were. But this link between coverage and success is not just the case in creative or artistic worlds.

Andy Ouderkirk, an inventor at the multinational company 3M, was named Innovator of the Year in 2013 and has been named on 170 patents, a proxy for creative success.

He became fascinated with what generates successful and inventive teams, so he started to do some research. He found that the inventors who were most likely to succeed within 3M and win the company’s Carlton Award, which recognized innovation, were not specialists.

They were polymaths, people with one area of depth, but a great deal of expertise in other areas as well.

These polymaths tended to have many patents in their area of focus, but also repeatedly took expertise gathered in one area and applied it to another.

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So, for any hiring managers out there looking for fresh talent, here’s a plea.

Don’t just look for people who fit into your clearly-defined slots. Make some space for those who don’t fit so clearly into any one category. Their breadth of experience might be invaluable.

THE EXPERTS AND PUNDITS THAT OUR SOCIETY LISTENS TO ARE USUALLY HOPELESS AT MAKING PREDICTIONS.

During 20 years of the Cold War, world-renowned forecasting expert Philip Tetlock collected and assessed the predictions of 284 experts. He concluded that experts are absolutely terrible at making predictions about anything.

Tetlock found that an expert’s years of experience, academic degree and even ability to access classified information made no difference.

When experts said that some potential event was impossible, it happened in 15 per cent of cases. Events declared to be an absolute sure thing failed to occur 25 per cent of the time.

And worryingly for anyone who listens to cable news, Tetlock found that there was a perverse and inverse relationship between fame and accuracy.

The more an expert appeared in the news, the more likely they were to be wrong, or as Tetlock famously put it, 

Roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.

One of the problems was that many of the experts’ focus was too narrow.

Having spent entire careers studying a single issue – say, US-Soviet relations – they tended to have explicit theories about how it worked.

So, what makes a better forecaster of future events? Well, researchers like psychologist Jonathan Baron point to active open-mindedness – a willingness to question your own beliefs.

Most of us fail at this, and can’t override our strong instinct to cherry-pick evidence that confirms our existing beliefs.

So, how exactly can we combat our tendency to stick to our existing beliefs, despite the evidence?

Kahan argues that one personality feature is important if we want to stay open-minded and think clearly about the world around us.

Instead of scientific knowledge – how much you know – emphasize scientific curiosity – a desire to learn more, willingness to look at new evidence and ability to think with a genuinely open mind.

Now, let’s consider how we can embrace this kind of curiosity.

I hope you loved reading this summary! 

Please Note: I have omitted many key points and examples from the book, if you have liked the summary I am sure you will love the book. 

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SUMMARY OF SUMMARY:

Range demands patience, open-mindedness and scientific curiosity. If we can foster and exemplify these, the chances that we will generate major innovations and contribute significantly to our economy and society increase.

We have to look and think beyond what has been taught or what the news reports are showing, they want us to believe and follow the agenda set by them. Very few people can manage to do this, the point is very few people end up making a difference.

If you intend to be in the 1% population of the world you cannot be doing what 99% of the population does.

Make it a habit to read regularly, it is food for your mind. The best part about being a community member of ‘Intelligent Investor’ reading is free and within your reach.

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Remember: “To keep winning, we should keep learning”

Hi,

This wonderful book has been summarized, by a very good friend. I have shared it as a guest blog. Here is a brief note about the writer:

Sushma Nayak:

She is a banking professional with 10 years of experience in handling multiple projects in financial crime compliance and banking operations.

She holds a Masters in Business Administration degree from Xavier's Institute of Management and aspires to learn and evolve as a leader while sharing knowledge and happiness around. 

Linkedin Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/sushma-nayak