Lifestyle

Why generalists will inherit the Earth



Malcolm Gladwell has a lot to answer for. In Outliers, the bestselling author defined the oft-cited “10,000-Hour Rule” which roped off Bill Gates, Tiger Woods and Mozart in a pantheon above the rest of us: practice — lots of it — makes perfect.

It made depressing reading for the lay generalist. The disheartening conclusion for anyone looking at their lives in retrospect was that rather a lot of it had been wasted, larking around, not knuckling down and choosing a discipline. But now there is good news for generalists. In his new book Range, investigative reporter David Epstein argues that it is generalists who triumph in a specialised world. For every Tiger Woods there is a Roger Federer, whose “pully” (as opposed to pushy) parents stood back to allow him drift into his elite bracket with a broader range of experiences.

“Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts,” writes Epstein, emphasising the importance of an unstructured “sampling period” in their careers. Even Gladwell approves. “Makes me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved Range,” he wrote. Here’s the case for the generalists…

Range anxiety 

The bad news: we don’t live in a “tidy-kind world”, as Epstein puts it, one with “rules and answers” that “don’t change over time”. The good news: that means Gladwell is reading it wrong — if you overspecialise then you are less able to adapt. Epstein dismantles the “cult of the headstart”, saying “islands of genius” are adrift in a fast-changing environment because they can only do one thing. He cites a study by psychiatrist Darold Treffert into savant pianists like Leslie Lemke, whose flawless “retrieval capacity” ensures they can recall thousands of songs from memory. But they couldn’t recall an atonal piece, not written in a key or style. Patterns were vital; without them, they were lost.

Embrace epic fails 

Failure is good — racing ahead of your peer group can mask deficiencies. Embrace “desirable difficulties”: obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower and more frustrating in the short term. One is the “generational effect”: struggling to generate an answer of your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. Epstein says: “Socrates was on to something when he forced students to generate answers rather than bestowing them.” This requires the learner to “sacrifice current performance for future benefit”.

Deliberate amateurs 

Epstein demonstrates the myopia of specialisation: a high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance in a study into the commercial creation of comic books; 284 experienced academics in Cold War modelling produced 82,361 predictions in the Eighties but were found to be “horrific forecasters”; the disastrous Challenger shuttle mission in 1986 made “mistakes of conformity”. The unusual answers, and ones from amateurs, are often the most fruitful. Life is an experiment, Epstein shows, not given to certainty. Assume nothing.

Range by David Epstein (Pan Macmillan; £20) is out now, buy it here.



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