David Epstein > Quotes

“If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“First act and then think...We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models." We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: "high tolerance for ambiguity"; "systems thinkers"; "additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains"; "repurposing what is already available"; "adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process"; "ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways"; "synthesizing information from many different sources"; "they appear to flit among ideas"; "broad range of interests"; "they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests"; "need to learn significantly across domains"; "Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“We fail...tasks we don't have the guts to quit."...knowing when to quit is such a strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“We learn who we are only by living, and not before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The average expert was a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, academic degrees, and even (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that some future event was impossible or nearly impossible, it nonetheless occurred 15 percent of the time. When they declared a sure thing, it failed to transpire more than one-quarter of the time.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“...problem solving "begins with the typing of the problem."..."a problem well put is half-solved.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he [Oliver Smithies] told me. 'Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“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.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted to complexity, and that has manifested in flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world. In every cognitive direction, the minds of premodern citizens were severely constrained by the concrete world before them.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“...he preferred to view his crew leadership not as decision making, but as sensemaking. "If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it. I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it...If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“If you want to know if your kid is going to be fast, the best genetic test right now is a stopwatch. Take him to the playground and have him face the other kids.' Foster's point is that, despite the avant-garde allure of genetic testing, gauging speed indirectly is foolish and inaccurate compared with testing it directly - like measuring a man's height by dropping a ball from a roof and using the time it takes to hit him in the head to determine how tall he is. Why not just use a tape measure?”
― David Epstein, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

“When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations, it is called "far transfer.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested...Be a flirt with your possible selves. Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. "Test and learn...”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer's disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer's disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it's a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“„Be careful not to be too careful“, Delbrück warned, „or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“What Ibarra calls the “ plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “ test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on what Weick called over learned behavior. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool. Research on aviation accidents, for example, found that "a common pattern was the crew's decision to continue with their original plan" even when conditions changed dramatically.”
― David Epstein, RANGE

“The "deliberate amateur"... "A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun," ...Be careful not to be too careful, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World / Messy / The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

“In 2017, Greg Duncan, the education economist, along with psychologist Drew Bailey and colleagues, reviewed sixty-seven early childhood education programs meant to boost academic achievement. Programs like Head Start did give a head start, but academically that was about it. The researchers found a pervasive “fadeout” effect, where a temporary academic advantage quickly diminished and often completely vanished. On a graph, it looks eerily like the kind that show future elite athletes catching up to their peers who got a head start in deliberate practice.
A reason for this, the researchers concluded, is that early childhood education programs teach “closed” skills that can be acquired quickly with repetition of procedures, but that everyone will pick up at some point anyway. The fadeout was not a disappearance of skill so much as the rest of the world catching up. The motor-skill equivalent would be teaching a kid to walk a little early. Everyone is going to learn it anyway, and while it might be temporarily impressive, there is no evidence that rushing it matters.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“An inventor's depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes -- exercise, devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area -- so they had numerous patents in that area -- but they were not as deep as the specialists. They aslo had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths' breadth increased markedly as they learned about "the adjacent stuff," while they actually lost a modicum of depth.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“lateral thinking with withered technology”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the "sunk cost fallacy." Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because it would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Being forced to generate answers improves subsequent learning even if the generated answer is wrong.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World