How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
By reading this book, you will learn that life is an endless story where you can be whatever you want to be. Eighter you are practicing something all your life to be better and better or search for meaning by challenging yourself in different areas of life, you can find success if you are persistent enough.
Failure is a learning experience only that allows you to grow bigger and more confident. Life will bring you success if you do not live the life of mediocrity, or you are ready to spread your knowledge across multiple domains to gain experience for later use.
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Thoughts I most like in „Range”
„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.”
David Epstein
„learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress.”
David Epstein
„The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”
David Epstein
„The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.”
David Epstein
„They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about.”
David Epstein
„Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience.”
David Epstein
„highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident.”
David Epstein
„Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.”
David Epstein
„Breadth of training predicts breadth of the transfer. That is, the more context in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”
David Epstein
„The current world is not so kind; it requires thinking that cannot fall back on previous experience. Like math students, we need to be able to pick a strategy for problems we have never seen before. In the life we lead today, Gentner told me, we need to be reminded of things that are only abstractly or relationally similar. And the more creative you want to be, the more important that is.”
David Epstein
„Labor economist Kirabo Jackson has demonstrated that even the dreaded administrative headache is known as „teacher turnover” captures the value of informed switching. He found that teachers are more effective at improving student performance after they switch to a new school and that the effect is not explained by switching to higher-achieving schools or better students….Switchers are winners, It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.”
David Epstein
„Yes, striving to accomplish a single overarching goal every day means you have grit, determination, and resilience. But the ability to pull yourself together mentally and physically in a competition is different from the new challenges that await you. So after you retire, write a poem, try to start your own business, stay out a little late, devote time to something that doesn’t have a clear end goal. In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way. ”
David Epstein
„Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same.”
David Epstein
„Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyper specialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The result can be disastrous.”
David Epstein
„In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, but it can also be disastrous.”
David Epstein
„We are very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to to accomplish a task.”
David Epstein
„The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, the experience can backfire.”
David Epstein
„The more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.”
David Epstein
„Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to the experience. In middle age, adults grow more consistent and caution and less curious, open-minded, and inventive.”
David Epstein
„A person doesn’t know what he can do unless he tries. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”
David Epstein
„Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”
David Epstein
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