Range - David Epstein Page 0,119

a ton. Also, one day while my brain was overheating, a cardinal, a blue jay, and an oriole appeared near my windowsill—that’s all the eponymous birds of Major League Baseball teams. That never happens.

Thank you, first, to the entire team at Riverhead, especially my editor, Courtney Young. Courtney spooked me a little when we first agreed to go about this book project together by saying something like, “I’d be worried if I weren’t familiar with you.” [Gulp]. She then proceeded to respond like a great coach developing an athlete; she let me engage in broad, self-directed activity, and when I resurfaced two years later with a manuscript that was too long, she switched gears and responded to my desire for fast and frequent feedback as I cut it down to size and shape. When the time came, she gave feedback that made a wicked learning environment a bit more kind (“Yes, I like it; now he sounds like less of a magical gnome.” —Courtney’s feedback on what may have been an overwritten description.). Appropriately, she has range; she almost became an engineer.

Thank you to my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who finished 235th in the New York City Marathon, which is important, but not so important as his animating mission, which, as far as I can tell, is to help writers earn their freedom. To use a sports analogy, my strategy for working with an agent was to draft the best athlete available and get out of the way.

Thank you to everyone who took part in my tortuous fact-checking process, but especially Emily Krieger and Drew Bailey, and the interviewees who gave their time (again . . . and sometimes again) so that I could pester them about things they had already told me. Thanks to Masaharu Kawamata and Tyler Walker for help with Japanese translation.

Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. The first time we met was for a debate at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, framed as “10,000-hours vs. The Sports Gene.” (It’s on YouTube.) It turned into a great discussion, and I think we both took new thoughts home. He invited me for an interval workout the next day, and then again, and we got to talking (only during warmup) about that whole “Roger vs. Tiger” idea. The discussion was filed away somewhere in my head and surfaced when I interacted with Tillman Scholars. I’m not sure I would have explored the topic without it. As psychologist Howard Gruber wrote, “Ideas are not really lost, they are reactivated when useful.”

This book was the greatest organizational challenge I’ve faced; figuring out how to gather information, what to include, and then where to put it overwhelmed me many times. A quote kept coming to mind: “It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla’s tired.” Whatever the reception, I’m proud I kept coming back for more. And I thank the friends and family who supported me and accepted my answer of “hopefully next year” to so many questions. Believe me, it’s not that I didn’t want tickets to that thing I like. It’s just that, as any Westerosi knows, my house words are: “When my book is done.” Those supporters: My brother, Daniel (whose enthusiastic response to my rambling about ideas in chapter 4 convinced me to write about them); sister, Charna (she may have purchased all the copies of my last book); my parents, Mark and Eve, who always waited until after I did something ridiculous to weigh in, rather than prohibiting it beforehand. It makes for a vibrant sampling period. Thanks to “Prince Andrei,” you’ll know who you are when you read this; and to my niece Sigalit Koufax (yes, that Koufax) Epstein-Pawar, and her dad Ameya; and to Andrea and John for moral and caloric support, and the whole Weiss and Green families. Special thanks to Liz O’Herrin and Mike Christman for getting me involved with the Tillman Foundation; to Steve Mesler for getting me involved with Classroom Champions; to my late friend Kevin Richards, without whom I probably would not have become a science writer; and to my friend Harry Mbang, who is never not up for a midnight run to a certain bookstore. Thanks to the entire Chalkbeat family—keep swimming.

Special thanks to Toru Okada, Alice, Natasha Rostova, Katurian K. Katurian, Petter and Mona Kummel, Nate River, Gbessa, Benno von Archimboldi, Tony Webster, Sonny’s brother, Tony Loneman, the trio of Tommy, Doc, and Maurice, Braiden Chaney, Stephen Florida, and many