Range - David Epstein Page 0,118

In the wider world, “every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.” It doesn’t mean breakthrough creation is luck, although that helps, but rather that it is hard and inconsistent. Going where no one has is a wicked problem. There is no well-defined formula or perfect system of feedback to follow. It’s like the stock market that way; if you want the sky highs, you have to tolerate a lot of lows. As InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham told me, “breakthrough and fallacy look a lot alike initially.”

The question I set out to explore was how to capture and cultivate the power of breadth, diverse experience, and interdisciplinary exploration, within systems that increasingly demand hyperspecialization, and would have you decide what you should be before first figuring out who you are.

Early in the book, I discussed athletes and musicians, because they are practically synonymous with early specialization. But among athletes who go on to become elite, broad early experience and delayed specialization is the norm. Musicians arrive at greatness via an incredible diversity of paths, but early hyperspecialization is often not necessary for skill development and in the more improvisational forms it is rare—although, as in sports, many adults have an enormous financial interest in making it seem essential. Sviatoslav Richter was one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century; he started formal lessons at twenty-two. Steve Nash is a relatively normal-sized Canadian who did not get a basketball until he was thirteen years old; he won the NBA MVP award, twice. As I write this, I am listening to a professional violinist who started when she was eighteen. Of course, she was told to stop before she started because she was too old. She now makes a point of teaching beginner adults. The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even these relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it.

So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind. Two Roman historians recorded that when Julius Caesar was a young man he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain and broke down in tears. “Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable,” he supposedly said. Pretty soon, that concern was a distant memory and Caesar was in charge of the Roman Republic—which he turned into a dictatorship before he was murdered by his own pals. It’s fair to say that like most youth athletes with highlight reels, he peaked early. 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. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.

Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.

Finally, remember that there is nothing inherently wrong with specialization. We all specialize to one degree or another, at some point or other. My initial spark of interest in this topic came from reading viral articles and watching conference keynotes that offered early hyperspecialization as some sort of life hack, a prescription that will save you the wasted time of diverse experience and experimentation. I hope I have added ideas to that discussion, because research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated. As Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a century ago, of the free exchange of ideas, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

Acknowledgments

I VIEW BOOK WRITING as kind of like running the 800—torture in the middle, but if you PR or give a supreme effort, pretty soon you look back and say, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” It was, but still you should do it again.

All sorts of cool things transpired while I worked on this book. For example: I learned