On: Mastery, Specialization, and Range.

Episode: N/A

Date: May 2019

Background: Journalist, author of “The Sports Gene” and “Range“.

Key Subjects:

• Paths to performance: (early) specialization versus generalization.
  • Need specialists (to advance knowledge), but also generalists (to integrate knowledge).
  • Society tends to overvalue specialists and undervalue generalists.
  • People are forced to specialize too early (education/work).
    • Forced to make early decision about matching your abilities/interests and work.
    • Underestimate how much personality and environment change over time.
  • May benefit from early generalization:
    • Learn who you are in practice, not theory: experiment in order to find best match.
    • Learn how to think, evaluate new information, what is true.
• Benefits and costs:
  • Specialization: head-start, narrow deep knowledge, limited tool set (the inside view).
  • Generalization: slow-start, sampling, wide range of skills and tools (the outside view).
• Match with internal traits:

• • Match abilities and interests: if you don’t know, sample / experiment (generalization).
  • Match personality: curious, open-minded = generalization, etc.
• Match with external environment:
  • Kind: stable, recurring patterns, immediate feedback = instinctive pattern recognition = specialization.
  • Wicked: unpredictable, delayed feedback = apply wide variety of patterns = generalization
• Learning environments:
  • Kind: increasing automation of knowledge accumulation.
  • Wicked: increasing access to knowledge across domains through better communication.
• Applied to organizations:
  • Calibrate to culture to minimize two different types of errors:
    • Mindless conformity: follow procedures and use the tools no matter what.
    • Reckless deviance: never following procedures, improvise.
• Flynn effect:
  • Increase in IQ scores, specifically the more abstract section of IQ tests.
  • Adapted to current environmental requirements:
    • Need to transfer knowledge from one domain to the next as we handle new things.
    • Higher requirement to think in abstract classifications.
• Context dependent.
  • Limits of specialization:
    • Limits of reductionism: understanding the parts, but not the whole.
    • Surrogate markers: solving only parts a problem, not solving the whole problem.
  • Increasing opportunities to apply knowledge (patterns, solutions) to different domains.

Key Takeaways:

• Limits of specialization are mirrored in the limits to reductionism 
• Opportunities in applying existing knowledge to different domains to counter limits of specialization / understanding complexity.

Worth Listening:

Clear and systematic run through the book (Range).

8/10