My Learnings from “Range” by David Epstein

I first heard of Range when David Epstein went on Bill Simmons’ podcast back in May of 2019. I thought it was an interesting conversation, but it didn’t bring me to hit buy on Amazon for some reason. The book was recommended to me by my friend, Ben, not too long ago because he knew it was right up my alley. His recommendation was the extra push I needed. The book covers a mix of sports, psychology, and how successful people are successful — all topics that I eat up.

I wouldn’t say that this book changed my life, but it did have a prominent impact on my own outlook of my future. I don’t want to use this writing to give a summary of the book, but rather what my personal takeaways were from the book. The title and tagline of the book sum it up well — “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.” Epstein uses this book to explain why having a wide range of experiences is beneficial, specifically when facing challenges and problems.

Some activities or jobs do require an immense amount of time and hyper-specialization to become the best. In order to become a grandmaster of chess, you need to have been playing pretty much all your life. Epstein’s thesis is that there are very few professions where focusing on one subject is the catalyst which brings you to the top. He claims that only for activities that are very repetitive in nature does it require a narrow focus on one subject to be successful. A few examples of careers that require the repetitive nature to be successful which he used were being a professional golfer, chess player, or a surgeon.

For most other things in life, you’ll face a wide range of problems that you need to hurdle. He writes that one of the best ways to break through problems and come up with creative solutions is the practice of using analogies. For a given situation that you can’t make complete sense of, try to draw on previous experiences you’ve had and create an analogous situation.

Epstein writes about how there was a researcher observing and studying how scientific labs functioned. There were two labs that were studying E. Coli which the researcher sat in on — one lab was made up of scientists and researchers that were all specialists in E. coli and the other lab was a mixture of biologists, mathematicians, chemists, etc.

Both labs ran into a similar problem at the same time which they were struggling to break through for their research. Eventually, one of the people in the diverse lab was able to pull an analogy from the field where they had expertise in and related it to the E. Coli problem. They were able to break through while the other E. Coli specialized lab was still stumped.

It was an interesting position for the research observing the labs because they were able to see both labs struggling with the same problem, but due to NDA’s the researcher signed, they weren’t allowed to tell the E. Coli specialized lab how to solve their problem.

As a quick aside, there is nothing more that I love in life than using a sports analogy to a real-life situation. Give me any situation and I’ll be able to come up with a sports analogy for it. I’m using this book to give extra credence to continue using sports analogies as much as I can!

Further in the book, Epstein talks about two different types of people — people that are an “I” and people that are a “T”. He explains that a person who is an “I” has a very deep subject matter expertise in one area. Someone who is a “T” still has expertise in an area, but it isn’t as deep into the topic as the “I”. The advantage that the “T” has is that they can reach outwards and pull across several domains since they have cursory knowledge in areas outside of their specialty. Even though the message of the book is that you want to be a “T”, he still does say that there needs to be collaboration between both types of people for solutions to be formed.

The biggest learning from the book for me is to continue to push myself to have new experiences. I think it’s an added benefit if these new experiences are out of my comfort zone, but I needed the reminder to continue to try new things. I know this idea is the opposite of groundbreaking, but the point that was driven home by this book for me is that being able to draw from a diverse background of experiences is more beneficial than I realized.

This book has given me greater confidence to be able to step into a situation that I might know very little about. If anything, not being steeped so deeply in the topic could give an opportunity to think about a situation in a different way than the people that have spent 30+ years of their life on a topic. It is still important to have some core knowledge that you can always lean on as your support, but this book has made me realize that I can extend that core knowledge outside its own domain and be very effective by doing so. I now want to point my career in a direction where I can leverage this in the future.

Whenever I am in a situation going forward that has me completely bamboozled, I’m going to take a deep breath and try to draw on past experiences to see if I can break down the problem into something that I can understand. Do I have an analogous situation that can help guide me through the problem? Just having this in my back pocket gives me comfort for the next challenges that are ahead for me.

Here are some of the things that I want to actively do to bring more range into all aspects of my life:

• Talk to people outside of my profession, even if I don’t have a specific interest in their field currently
• Never order the same thing from the restaurant twice
• Go to new places just for the sake of it
• Continue to write on topics outside of my current knowledge
• Have a more diverse selection of reading material
• Listen to a wider array of podcasts (even though I know I’ll make sure catch most of Bill Simmons episodes)

I would love to hear some other suggestions of how you bring range into your life!