As he puts it: "And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands – conceptual reasoning skill that can connect new ideas and work across contexts". He then argues that while specialization is useful for the kinds of problems in closed predictable environments like a chess game or playing music, the modern world is characterized by wicked problems which requires us to deal with a new situation where we can't rely on perfecting from known experience. Starting in the world of sports he contrasts Tiger Woods (who specialized early as a golfer) with Roger Federer (who came to focus on tennis much later in life) and argues that when he looks more broadly at successful people, they "seemed to have more Roger than Tiger in their development stories". In the book, he argues that range – defined as more diverse experience across multiple fields – is more relevant in today's society than specialization because the wicked problems of the modern world require bridging experience and knowledge from multiple fields to foster solutions.Įpstein's basic argument is that focus on early specialization is unwarranted. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is a 2019 book by David Epstein in which he expands on the points from his previous book The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance to make a more general argument against overspecialization.
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