Range - David Epstein Page 0,13

true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.”

Those findings are reminiscent of a speech Steve Jobs gave, in which he famously recounted the importance of a calligraphy class to his design aesthetics. “When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” he said. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.” Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed that logic problems could be solved like math equations. It resulted in absolutely nothing of practical importance until seventy years after Boole passed away, when Shannon did a summer internship at AT&T’s Bell Labs research facility. There he recognized that he could combine telephone call-routing technology with Boole’s logic system to encode and transmit any type of information electronically. It was the fundamental insight on which computers rely. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time,” Shannon said.

In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.

Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.

CHAPTER 2

How the Wicked World Was Made

THE TOWN OF DUNEDIN sits at the base of a hilly peninsula that juts off of New Zealand’s South Island into the South Pacific. The peninsula is famous for yellow-eyed penguins, and Dunedin boasts, demurely, the world’s steepest residential street. It also features the University of Otago, the oldest university in New Zealand, and home to James Flynn, a professor of political studies who changed how psychologists think about thinking.

He started in 1981, intrigued by a thirty-year-old paper that reported IQ test scores of American soldiers in World Wars I and II. The World War II soldiers had performed better, by a lot. A World War I soldier who scored smack in the middle of his peers—the 50th percentile—would have made only the 22nd percentile compared to soldiers in World War II. Flynn wondered if perhaps civilians had experienced a similar improvement. “I thought, if IQ gains had occurred anywhere,” he told me, “maybe they had occurred everywhere.” If he was right, psychologists had been missing something big right before their eyes.

Flynn wrote to researchers in other countries asking for data, and on a dull November Saturday in 1984, he found a letter in his university mailbox. It was from a Dutch researcher, and it contained years of raw data from