Range

The Myth of Early Specialization

The Tiger Woods narrative of early, narrow focus isn’t the only path—or even the most common one—to elite performance.

“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.”

Examples:

• German national soccer team World Cup winners: late specializers who didn’t play organized soccer until age 22+
• Boxer Vasyl Lomachenko: took four years off boxing to study Ukrainian dance, crediting this diversity for enhanced footwork

Kind vs. Wicked Domains

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question.”

Kind environments: Clear rules, immediate feedback, repetitive patterns (chess, golf, firefighting). Narrow specialization works well here.

Wicked domains: Unclear rules, ambiguous feedback, non-obvious patterns (financial trends, human behavior). Experience often breeds confidence without skill. Narrow specialization can become a liability.

The Power of Breadth

“A gift of a single analogy from a different domain tripled the proportion of solvers who got the radiation problem.”

The most effective problem-solvers practice analogical thinking—recognizing conceptual similarities across seemingly unrelated domains. Breakthrough solutions often come from outsiders who reframe problems unexpectedly.

Learning and Conceptual Thinking

“Students do not view mathematics as a system. They view it as just a set of procedures.”

Effective learning requires:

• Spacing (distributed practice)
• Interleaving (mixing different types of problems)
• Desirable difficulty (approaches that feel less efficient but produce more flexible knowledge)

Match Quality Over Forced Persistence

“The benefits to increased match quality… outweigh the greater loss in skills. Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself.”

Van Gogh example: Tried multiple careers—missionary, teacher, artist—before finding his calling at age 33. His willingness to change directions, rather than his grit, enabled his genius.

Compare yourself to your former self, not to prodigies. Work forward from promising situations rather than reverse-engineering a predetermined path.

Organizational Culture

“The most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once.”

NASA example: Wernher von Braun fostered informal dissent through “Monday Notes”—channels for raising problems across divisions. His successor eliminated this, and the organization became rigid and less likely to surface critical concerns.

The Innovation Ecosystem

“Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine.”

The most influential scientific papers combine conventional knowledge with unusual combinations of ideas. Breadth of exposure enables novel connections.

Range as a Tool for Complexity

“In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer. In more open-ended games, I think they certainly will.”

AI excels in narrow, rule-bound domains but remains savant-like in open-ended problems. Human creativity emerges from integrating diverse knowledge.

The Challenge

“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.”

Actions:

• Invest in exploration
• Read outside your field
• Build networks across specialties
• Be willing to abandon previous goals if new directions prove more promising

The most valuable expertise isn’t depth alone—it’s the ability to integrate broadly.