Range Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID EPSTEIN

  The Sports Gene

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by David Epstein

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Epstein, David J., author.

  Title: Range : why generalists triumph in a specialized world / David Epstein.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018051571 (print) | LCCN 2018053769 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735214491 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735214484

  Subjects: LCSH: Expertise. | Ability.

  Classification: LCC BF378.E94 (ebook) | LCC BF378.E94 E67 2019 (print) | DDC 153.9—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051571

  Cover image: Image Source / Getty Images

  Version_2

  For Elizabeth,

  this one and any other one

  Contents

  ALSO BY DAVID EPSTEIN

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION: Roger vs. Tiger

  CHAPTER 1: The Cult of the Head Start

  CHAPTER 2: How the Wicked World Was Made

  CHAPTER 3: When Less of the Same Is More

  CHAPTER 4: Learning, Fast and Slow

  CHAPTER 5: Thinking Outside Experience

  CHAPTER 6: The Trouble with Too Much Grit

  CHAPTER 7: Flirting with Your Possible Selves

  CHAPTER 8: The Outsider Advantage

  CHAPTER 9: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

  CHAPTER 10: Fooled by Expertise

  CHAPTER 11: Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools

  CHAPTER 12: Deliberate Amateurs

  CONCLUSION: Expanding Your Range

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  And he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on the overall estate rather than any of its parts. . . . And Nikolay’s management produced the most brilliant results.

  —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

  No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.

  —Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History

  INTRODUCTION

  Roger vs. Tiger

  LET’S START WITH a couple of stories from the world of sports. This first one, you probably know.

  The boy’s father could tell something was different. At six months old, the boy could balance on his father’s palm as he walked through their home. At seven months, his father gave him a putter to fool around with, and the boy dragged it everywhere he went in his little circular baby walker. At ten months, he climbed down from his high chair, trundled over to a golf club that had been cut down to size for him, and imitated the swing he’d been watching in the garage. Because the father couldn’t yet talk with his son, he drew pictures to show the boy how to place his hands on the club. “It is very difficult to communicate how to putt when the child is too young to talk,” he would later note.

  At two—an age when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention list physical developmental milestones like “kicks a ball” and “stands on tiptoe”—he went on national television and used a club tall enough to reach his shoulder to drive a ball past an admiring Bob Hope. That same year, he entered his first tournament, and won the ten-and-under division.

  There was no time to waste. By three, the boy was learning how to play out of a “sand twap,” and his father was mapping out his destiny. He knew his son had been chosen for this, and that it was his duty to guide him. Think about it: if you felt that certain about the path ahead, maybe you too would start prepping your three-year-old to handle the inevitable and insatiable media that would come. He quizzed the boy, playing reporter, teaching him how to give curt answers, never to offer more than precisely what was asked. That year, the boy shot 48, eleven over par, for nine holes at a course in California.

  When the boy was four, his father could drop him off at a golf course at nine in the morning and pick him up eight hours later, sometimes with the money he’d won from those foolish enough to doubt.

  At eight, the son beat his father for the first time. The father didn’t mind, because he was convinced that his boy was singularly talented, and that he was uniquely equipped to help him. He had been an outstanding athlete himself, and against enormous odds. He played baseball in college when he was the only black player in the entire conference. He understood people, and discipline; a sociology major, he served in Vietnam as a member of the Army’s elite Green Berets, and later taught psychological warfare to future officers. He knew he hadn’t done his best with three kids from a previous marriage, but now he could see that he’d been given a second chance to do the right thing with number four. And it was all going according to plan.

  The boy was already famous by the time he reached Stanford, and soon his father opened up about his importance. His son would have a larger impact than Nelson Mandela, than Gandhi, than Buddha, he insisted. “He has a larger forum than any of them,” he said. “He’s the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One.”

  * * *

  —

  This second story, you also probably know. You might not recognize it at first.

  His mom was a coach, but she never coached him. He would kick a ball around with her when he learned to walk. As a boy, he played squash with his father on Sundays. He dabbled in skiing, wrestling, swimming, and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, badminton over his neighbor’s fence, and soccer at school. He would later give credit to the wide range of sports he played for helping him develop his athleticism and hand-eye coordination.

  He found that the sport really didn’t matter much, so long as it included a ball. “I was always very much more interested if a ball was involved,” he would remember. He was a kid who loved to play. His parents had no particular athletic aspirations for him. “We had no plan A, no plan B,” his mother would later say. She and the boy’s father encouraged him to sample a wide array of sports. In fact, it was essential. The boy “became unbearable,” his mother said, if he had to stay still for too long.

  Though his mother taught tennis, she decided against working with him. “He would have just upset me anyway,” she said. “He tried out every strange stroke and certainly never returned a ball normally. That is simply no fun for a mother.” Rather than pushy, a Sports Illustrated writer would observe that his parents were, if anything, “pully.” Nearing his teens, the boy began to gravitate more toward tennis, and “if they nudged him at all, it was to stop taking tennis so seriously.” When he played matches, his mother often wandered away to chat with friends. His father had only one rule: “Just don’t cheat.” He didn’t, and he started getting really good.

  As a teenager, he was good enough to warrant an interview with the local newspaper. His mother was appalled to read that, when asked what he would buy with a hypothetical first paycheck from playi
ng tennis, her son answered, “a Mercedes.” She was relieved when the reporter let her listen to a recording of the interview and they realized there’d been a mistake: the boy had said “Mehr CDs,” in Swiss German. He simply wanted “more CDs.”

  The boy was competitive, no doubt. But when his tennis instructors decided to move him up to a group with older players, he asked to move back so he could stay with his friends. After all, part of the fun was hanging around after his lessons to gab about music, or pro wrestling, or soccer.

  By the time he finally gave up other sports—soccer, most notably—to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists, and nutritionists. But it didn’t seem to hamper his development in the long run. In his midthirties, an age by which even legendary tennis players are typically retired, he would still be ranked number one in the world.

  * * *

  —

  In 2006, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer met for the first time, when both were at the apex of their powers. Tiger flew in on his private jet to watch the final of the U.S. Open. It made Federer especially nervous, but he still won, for the third year in a row. Woods joined him in the locker room for a champagne celebration. They connected as only they could. “I’ve never spoken with anybody who was so familiar with the feeling of being invincible,” Federer would later describe it. They quickly became friends, as well as focal points of a debate over who was the most dominant athlete in the world.

  Still, the contrast was not lost on Federer. “His story is completely different from mine,” he told a biographer in 2006. “Even as a kid his goal was to break the record for winning the most majors. I was just dreaming of just once meeting Boris Becker or being able to play at Wimbledon some time.”

  It seems pretty unusual for a child with “pully” parents, and who first took his sport lightly, to grow into a man who dominates it like no one before him. Unlike Tiger, thousands of kids, at least, had a head start on Roger. Tiger’s incredible upbringing has been at the heart of a batch of bestselling books on the development of expertise, one of which was a parenting manual written by Tiger’s father, Earl. Tiger was not merely playing golf. He was engaging in “deliberate practice,” the only kind that counts in the now-ubiquitous ten-thousand-hours rule to expertise. The “rule” represents the idea that the number of accumulated hours of highly specialized training is the sole factor in skill development, no matter the domain. Deliberate practice, according to the study of thirty violinists that spawned the rule, occurs when learners are “given explicit instructions about the best method,” individually supervised by an instructor, supplied with “immediate informative feedback and knowledge of the results of their performance,” and “repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.” Reams of work on expertise development shows that elite athletes spend more time in highly technical, deliberate practice each week than those who plateau at lower levels:

  Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.

  The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande pointed out that when doctors joke about left ear surgeons, “we have to check to be sure they don’t exist.”

  In the ten-thousand-hours-themed bestseller Bounce, British journalist Matthew Syed suggested that the British government was failing for a lack of following the Tiger Woods path of unwavering specialization. Moving high-ranking government officials between departments, he wrote, “is no less absurd than rotating Tiger Woods from golf to baseball to football to hockey.”

  Except that Great Britain’s massive success at recent Summer Olympics, after decades of middling performances, was bolstered by programs set up specifically to recruit adults to try new sports and to create a pipeline for late developers—“slow bakers,” as one of the officials behind the program described them to me. Apparently the idea of an athlete, even one who wants to become elite, following a Roger path and trying different sports is not so absurd. Elite athletes at the peak of their abilities do spend more time on focused, deliberate practice than their near-elite peers. But when scientists examine the entire developmental path of athletes, from early childhood, it looks like this:

  Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area. The title of one study of athletes in individual sports proclaimed “Late Specialization” as “the Key to Success”; another, “Making It to the Top in Team Sports: Start Later, Intensify, and Be Determined.”

  When I began to write about these studies, I was met with thoughtful criticism, but also denial. “Maybe in some other sport,” fans often said, “but that’s not true of our sport.” The community of the world’s most popular sport, soccer, was the loudest. And then, as if on cue, in late 2014 a team of German scientists published a study showing that members of their national team, which had just won the World Cup, were typically late specializers who didn’t play more organized soccer than amateur-league players until age twenty-two or later. They spent more of their childhood and adolescence playing nonorganized soccer and other sports. Another soccer study published two years later matched players for skill at age eleven and tracked them for two years. Those who participated in more sports and nonorganized soccer, “but not more organized soccer practice/training,” improved more by age thirteen. Findings like these have now been echoed in a huge array of sports, from hockey to volleyball.

  The professed necessity of hyperspecialization forms the core of a vast, successful, and sometimes well-meaning marketing machine, in sports and beyond. In reality, the Roger path to sports stardom is far more prevalent than the Tiger path, but those athletes’ stories are much more quietly told, if they are told at all. Some of their names you know, but their backgrounds you probably don’t.

  I started writing this introduction right after the 2018 Super Bowl, in which a quarterback who had been drafted into professional baseball before football (Tom Brady), faced off against one who participated in football, basketball, baseball, and karate and had chosen between college basketball and football (Nick Foles). Later that very same month, Czech athlete Ester Ledecká became the first woman ever to win gold in two different sports (skiing and snowboarding) at the same Winter Olympics. When she was younger, Ledecká participated in multiple sports (she still plays beach volleyball and windsurfs), focused on school, and never rushed to be number one in teenage competition categories. The Washington Post article the day after her second gold proclaimed, “In an era of sports specialization, Ledecká has been an evangelist for maintaining variety.” Just after her feat, Ukrainian boxer Vasyl Lomachenko set a record for the fewest fights needed to win world titles in three different weight classes. Lomachenko, who took four years off boxing as a kid to learn traditional Ukrainian dance, reflected, “I was doing so many different sports as a young boy—gymnastics, basketball, football, tennis—and I think, ultimately, everything came together with all those different kinds of
sports to enhance my footwork.”

  Prominent sports scientist Ross Tucker summed up research in the field simply: “We know that early sampling is key, as is diversity.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In 2014, I included some of the findings about late specialization in sports in the afterword of my first book, The Sports Gene. The following year, I got an invitation to talk about that research from an unlikely audience—not athletes or coaches, but military veterans. In preparation, I perused scientific journals for work on specialization and career-swerving outside of the sports world. I was struck by what I found. One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities. I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators.

  I also began to realize that some of the people whose work I deeply admired from afar—from Duke Ellington (who shunned music lessons to focus on drawing and baseball as a kid) to Maryam Mirzakhani (who dreamed of becoming a novelist and instead became the first woman to win math’s most famous prize, the Fields Medal)—seemed to have more Roger than Tiger in their development stories. I delved further and encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their range of experiences and interests, but because of it: a CEO who took her first job around the time her peers were getting ready to retire; an artist who cycled through five careers before he discovered his vocation and changed the world; an inventor who stuck to a self-made antispecialization philosophy and turned a small company founded in the nineteenth century into one of the most widely resonant names in the world today.