Woods’s rise to greatness exemplifies early and fiercely single-minded specialization: golf, golf, golf, from the age of 2. It’s there at the very opening of the book, where Epstein contrasts Tiger Woods with Roger Federer. Indeed, so smooth and persuasive is Epstein’s marshaling of evidence that I almost failed to notice an ambiguity lurking at the heart of his case. (A former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, he is previously the author of “The Sports Gene.”) Although the book unfolds according to a formula that has become familiar - story, study, lesson rinse and repeat - the storytelling is so dramatic, the wielding of data so deft and the lessons so strikingly framed that it’s never less than a pleasure to read. So what is the evidence for this happy thesis? Epstein serves up a feast of it, displaying his own impressively wide range of interests: art, classical music, jazz, science, technology and sports.
(Nietzsche, by the way, was himself quite the generalist, achieving distinction as a philosopher, a classicist and a composer before he came to a sticky end.) It means that excellence and well-roundedness naturally go together that each of us - in principle, at least - can realize the “comprehensiveness and multiplicity,” the “wholeness in manifoldness” that Nietzsche celebrated as the essence of human greatness. In the most rewarding domains of life, generalists are better positioned than specialists to excel. Breadth is the ally of depth, not its enemy. If you don’t, others will have a head start on you in the 10,000 hours of “ deliberate practice” supposedly necessary for breakout achievement.īut this message is perversely wrong - so David Epstein seeks to persuade us in “Range.” Becoming a champion, a virtuoso or a Nobel laureate does not require early and narrow specialization. To attain genuine excellence in any area - sports, music, science, whatever - you have to specialize, and specialize early: That’s the message. And a lot of thinking in current pop-psychology agrees. If you seek to do many things, you’ll taste a wider variety of human goods, but you may end up a well-rounded mediocrity - a dilettante.įolk wisdom holds the trade-off between breadth and depth to be a cruel one: “jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” and so forth.
If you concentrate on doing one thing, you might have a chance of doing it really well. Your time on earth is finite, as are your energy and attention.
RANGE Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World By David EpsteinĪre you a generalist or a specialist? Do you strive for breadth or depth in your career, in your life? After all, you can’t have both.
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