📖 Read More: Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention Education

Creative achievers tend to have broad interests.

No savant (someone who has extraordinary abilities in a narrow field) has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator.”.

In open-ended real-world problems, we have a huge advantage over computer AI.

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization.

“Wicked” domains have unclear rules, patterns may not be recognizable, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

“Kind” learning environments are domains in which instinctive pattern recognition is rewarded.

Foregoing a head start to develop range is worth it.

This is actually the more prevalent path to sports stardom. Federer grew up playing many different sports and only started concentrating on tennis much later in his teenage years.

Roger Federer is the counterpoint to Tiger Woods.

We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become to navigate it.

But I pick and choose ideas to include at my discretion.Įnjoy! Specializing is A Case, Not The Rule The following book summary is a collection of my notes and highlights taken straight from the book.

Persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way. We learn who we are when we try new things.Difficult learning now makes for superior performance later.An early sampling period is sometimes better than a focused head start.

The world needs both vertical-thinking specialists AND lateral-thinking generalists.

In a wicked world, where we are constantly facing rapidly changing demands, we desperately need people who aren’t afraid to quit and try something new, who think broadly and rely on a breadth of diverse experience to find creative solutions. In this persuasive counter-point, David Epstein argues that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. Harkened by the popularity of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, famous chess prodigies, and sports superstars, advice to rack up hours of focused, deliberate practice and specialize early has almost been accepted as basic truth – until now.

Range generalists