Range by David Epstein
“Great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one. ”
3 Main Messages:
Diversity of thought and experience is crucial in all fields.
We need to ensure we have a range of varied experiences, knowledge interactions and relationships.
With AI covering the simplest jobs it leaves creativity of thought open for humans to explore.
All my life I have been asked what my specialism is. At school we were channelled into only 3 subjects at A-level and one degree specialism by the age of 18. Once I had chosen teaching as my career I was again asked what my main subject was. The problem was that I didn’t have one. I’m what is known as a jack-of-all-trades: pretty good at most things but not outstanding at any. Even now, in my 50s, as a coach, I have been given the advice that I need to find my niche - and I still have no idea what that is.
Many would identify with this and, like me, berate themselves, knowing that a “jack-of-all-trades is a master of none,” without even realising that the second part of that Shakespearean quote is: “but oftentimes better than a master of one”.
David Epstein’s book Range really appeals for this reason. Epstein opens by comparing different sporting approaches to brilliance: Tiger Woods began golf at a very young age and focussed entirely on that, with great success.
Meanwhile Roger Federer “dabbled” in skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, basketball and badminton as well as tennis as a child. “He found that the sport really didn’t matter much, so long as it included a ball.” He claims that this variety helped him to develop his athleticism and hand-eye coordination.
Equally, it meant that Federer was able to sample a wide variety of sports before choosing the one he was best suited to. Epstein endorses this approach, allowing a “sampling period” before ramping up in one particular area.
The book continues in this vein, with examples from various fields, explaining the advantages of diversity of thought and experience. He shares stories from NASA, the art world, classical music, scientific discovery and the military - as you would expect the range is broad. However the message is consistent: that ‘T’ people (those with broad knowledge and experience as well as a specialism) are just as valid in a team as ‘I’ people (those who have a specific area of expertise).
In all honesty, by the end I was starting to flag. Epstein is a scientist, and while many readers will find the final few chapters fascinating, I was ready to give up. I already had the message and I had almost forgotten the absolute brilliance of the earlier chapters, which I found fascinating and highly relevant in education.
Epstein explains the ‘Flynn Effect’ whereby research has shown that each new generation’s average IQ increases 3 points every 10 years. This means that “today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so.” Extraordinary! Research has also shown that we are increasingly able to transfer information between fields and apply learned lessons in different scenarios and domains.
The implications of this for those working in education are enormous. Gone are the days when students learned by rote - now “they must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.”
as I still work in education, I found Chapter 4 the most interesting and have written in the margin that every teacher should read it! It gives recognisable classroom mistakes and assumptions of learning while explaining the obvious: that learning needs to be both durable and flexible, that is that the learning needs to stick and also be able to be applied broadly. As Nate Kornell said, “What you want is to make it easy to make it hard.”.
Epstein shares the finding of studies which show that “short term rehearsal gave purely short-term benefits” and that teachers who give ‘helpful’ hints “produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.” He concludes this detailed and fascinating chapter by summarising that “learning deeply means learning slowly.”
The things we struggle to understand are often the things we remember best. This has enormous implications for how we learn and how we should be teaching. As I mentioned, I found the second half of this book pretty challenging - I wonder if, in the long run, it is those sections that I will remember the best? I’ll let you know in a year or two!
