The Generalist Advantage
What I watched: “Why divergent thinkers beat geniuses in the real world” by David Epstein. Posted October 16, 2022.
I read David Epstein’s book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, a while ago. Loved it. Part of why I liked it so much was perhaps a bit of self-validation. My tagline on my social media for quite a while now has been “Generalist. I learn. I think. Sometimes I write about it.” I consider myself a generalist and always have. Turns out that can be an advantage.
In Range, Epstein suggests that in the modern world generalists offer tremendous value to society, business, and culture, perhaps now more than ever. Yes, there’s a place for specialists. I don’t think I’d want a generalist surgeon doing a complex procedure on me. But for so much of what we do professionally or creatively, seeing the broader view and being able to connect dots across multiple domains of knowledge and skill is beneficial to arriving at new ideas, solutions, and creative outputs.
This from Epstein’s book summarizes the concept nicely.
The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
My own strengths absolutely lie in my generalist mindset. No matter what I’m writing or talking about, I instinctually connect concepts and ideas from a wide swath of life’s experiences. I consider this my own sort of superpower. It works for me.
Epstein’s video provides a beautifully succinct summary of the gist of his book, but I still recommend reading the book. It currently resides on my personal top 10 nonfiction books list.
Epstein starts by discussing child prodigies such as Tiger Woods of golfing fame. Our natural inclination is to think of the skill growth of such prodigies to be a lifelong trajectory. Turns out that’s not always the case.
If they're this good at age five or age 10, they're going to be so good at age 20 or 30 or 40. I think the idea that parents tend to take from them [prodigies] is that if I just give my kid this very narrowly focused, early technical training, my kids will be ahead, and they'll stay ahead forever. It's just the problem is that turns out not to be the case.
Knowledge and skill acquisition and improvement isn’t a linear thing. We think it is, but it isn’t. Anyone who studies learning theory and dives into existing research will come to this same conclusion. Even under the best circumstances, learning of any kind is a messy, jumbled, and sometimes chaotic undertaking.
Humans aren’t wired to learn along linear progressions. In this “faster is better” world we live in, we think deep learning can be fast and easy. It can’t. The best and most meaningful learning, whether knowledge or skill, is developed slowly.
Epstein says there are two kinds of learning environments: kind and wicked.
Kind learning environments are those for which what we have to do is extremely clear and abides by specific rules and patterns. As one example, using a software program might be a relatively clearcut process of step 1, step 2, and so on. Another example is learning chess, something that requires repeated practice recognizing patterns.
Wicked learning environments are those for which there aren’t necessarily discernable rules and patterns. Perhaps the feedback loops for such learning are delayed, inaccurate, or require the constant reshuffling of ideas or patterns until we arrive at some semblance of mastery.
Most of what we do these days is of the wicked variety. We can’t count on things remaining the same over time. This is truer each day. Feedback isn’t always accurate or immediate. Entire knowledge domains can shift quickly as archives of information accumulate rapidly.
Increasingly, it’s the wicked world that we live in. Again, there is and always will be a place for specialists, but generalists will continue to have an advantage for much of innovation and creativity.
For the wicked world, you want a really broad training base, what scientists call a sampling period, where you're forming conceptual frameworks and abstract ideas that you can bend to the activity as the activity itself changes. For a lot of the 20th century, the biggest contributions came from specialists. But in the information age, as more information became quickly and easily disseminated, it became easier to be broader than a specialist. And the biggest contribution started coming from people who spread their work across a large number of technological domains, often taking something from one and bringing it to another area where it was seen as extraordinary, even if it was more ordinary somewhere else.
I often refer to this concept as a building blocks model. We can learn about just one color or shape of block, becoming really good with constructing with that one type of block. But, if we learn about all sizes and shapes of blocks, we can build them into far more interesting new patterns.
Epstein tells the story of Gunpei Yokoi, famed video game designer. Yokoi didn’t score well on the exams that the industrial education model sadly deems necessary to move into specialized areas of education. So, he had to settle for a lower tier job. He worked as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company. That company was Nintendo.
Through the happenstance of the company’s President seeing Yokoi playing around during his downtime, creating an extendable arm, the President ended up telling Yokoi to turn it into a toy, a toy that ended up becoming a big seller.
After that initial success, the President made Yokoi the head of a game and toy operation within the company. Yokoi wisely realized he was not himself equipped to do the cutting-edge research and development for such a venture. But he was able to access the widely available information from different domains and blend them together to create the hugely successful Game Boy device.
Yokoi called his philosophy “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Withered technology doesn’t sound so great when you first think of it, but what he meant was using technology that’s been around a while and is well understood, readily available, and sometimes cheap. Lateral thinking takes such technologies, concepts, or knowledge domains and merges them together in some unique way to create something else.
I think about much of what I’ve done in the past of which I’m proud and in hindsight lots of it was lateral thinking. I’ve often joked I know a little about a lot and a lot about little. Turns out that’s not such a bad thing despite my childhood programming that hyper specialization was the path to success and professional happiness.
The more we work in a rapidly changing world where we're not exactly sure what we should do next, or what work will look like next year or in five years or 10 years, the more we want those people who have had a broad view and can kind of draw on different stores of knowledge. And one of the ways I think about operationalizing that is essentially having a short-term mindset. I know that sounds bad, right? Tell people we should have long-term goals and that's like the commencement speech advice, “Who are you going to be in 10 or 20 years?” and “March toward that.”
It turns out that's not really a good way to operate, especially when you're younger. We're essentially telling someone to choose for a person they don't yet know who's going to be working in a world they can't yet conceive. The main advice, if I judge by what people say back to me, is to not feel behind because you probably don't even know where you're going anyway. And I think, rather than comparing yourself to someone who isn't you, you should compare yourself to yourself yesterday and proceed that way.
This way of thinking also syncs with why I don’t create long-term goals for myself anymore. It’s why I don’t measure my day-to-day progress based on a long-term worldview or personal metric created in the distant past, but rather I measure against the me of yesterday or the me of last week.
Again, I recommend you read Range. Excellent book. If you’re a generalist like me, you’ll find validation in its message. If you’re not a generalist currently, perhaps it will prompt you to start thinking a bit more that way because that’s a way of thinking that’s likely to prove fruitful going forward.
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