Range

Key Concepts

A “sampling period” helps build broad skills before specialization

Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area. (p. 7)

Specialization may work in structured fields, but is a hindrance in dynamic ones

In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule. (p. 20)

Cecchini: “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.” (p. 76)

We can stunt kids’ learning by not allowing them to struggle with problems

One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. (p. 85)

Psychologist Robert Bjork first used the phrase “desirable difficulties” in 1994. Twenty years later, he and a coauthor concluded a book chapter on applying the science of learning like this: “Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.” (p. 92)

Being able to see analogies from across fields can help one innovate and be creative

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. It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems, and Kepler was an analogy addict, so Gentner is naturally very fond of him. (p. 102)

“In the life we lead today,” Gentner told me, “we need to be reminded of things that are only abstractly or relationally similar. And the more creative you want to be, the more important that is.” (p. 104)

In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. (p. 115)

Find the right “match” to a field yields better long-term results

“Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities. (p. 128)

With less sampling opportunity, more students headed down a narrow path before figuring out if it was a good one. The English and Welsh students were specializing so early that they were making more mistakes. Malamud’s conclusion: “The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.” (p. 130)

Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.” (p. 160)

Organizational cultures need to give space for pushback and incongruence to get the best problems solving

Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me. (p. 257)

The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction. (p. 257)

Quotables

“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.” (p. 13)

“As psychologist Ellen Winner, one of the foremost authorities on gifted children, noted, no savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field.” (p. 32)

“So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.” (p. 47)

“In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.” (p. 77)

“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.” (p. 84)

“As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, ‘a problem well put is half-solved.’” (p. 115)

“Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.” (p. 130)

“As she put it, ‘We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.’ We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.” (p. 161)

“Toward the end of their book Serial Innovators, Abbie Griffin and her coauthors depart from stoically sharing their data and observations and offer advice to human resources managers. They are concerned that HR policies at mature companies have such well-defined, specialized slots for employees that potential serial innovators will look like ‘round pegs to the square holes’ and get screened out.” (p. 213)

“The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, whether or not it agreed with their current beliefs. Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs: they became more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge.” (p. 228)

“The very tool that had helped make NASA so consistently successful, what Diane Vaughan called ‘the original technical culture’ in the agency’s DNA, suddenly worked perversely in a situation where the familiar brand of data did not exist. Reason without numbers was not accepted.” (p. 245)

“So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.” (p. 290)