Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

As a white male, my specific morphology is well represented in the media, but as an introverted generalist, not as much. My introversion has its avatars in fiction, of course—neither nerdy brain-cases who live in cupboards under the stairs nor socially invisible milquetoasts with hidden strengths are too hard to find (hell, some of them show up in my own books)—but the generalists? the broad-spectrum observers whose curiosity drives them scattershot through life? Them, not so much.

However, just as I saw my inner introvert expounded upon in Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, this month, (despite the brain-crushing climb up the logarithmically steepening learning curve of my new job) I’ve seen my inner generalist defined and extolled in David Epstein’s new book, Range. Subtitled “Why generalists triumph in a specialized world,” it immediately caught my attention, and when I saw Epstein interviewed earlier this year, I had to have it. When it arrived in the post, it caught my wife’s eye, too, so much so that she grabbed it first (she’s also a generalist) making me wait.

This month, I finally had a chance to read it, and I am loving this book.

Within its pages I see myself described: my late meandering wander from one career to another, my habit of driving full-throttle into the depths of a subject, only to take off on a tangent (or embrace an entirely different interest), my love of analogies as a tool for explanation. Some people see my thirty-year career in programming/IT and think they have me pegged, but that’s my job, not my life. My life is a continuously shifting pattern of obsessions, from performing music to writing novels to repairing watches, binding books, hand-crafting furniture, and exploring ethnic cuisines, and reading, reading ,reading.

Aside from the delight of learning that my generalistic tendencies are decidedly not a detriment, this book has set my brain on fire as I come up with new ideas and conjectures about everything from educating children to the cause behind the rise in conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs.

For educators, especially, I think this is an important book to read and synthesize, because unlike introverts and extroverts, being a generalist is an acquirable trait, and a demonstrably desirable one as well. The problem is that specialization is seen as the preferred course.

“Start them young,” goes the tiger-parent mantra. “Give them a head start and it’ll pay dividends in the long run.” It makes perfect, intuitive sense. If you want your child to be the best at something, start them as young as possible. Fail in this and you’ll only hear the lament “They started too late” as a perfectly reasonable evaluation of failure. Match this up with “Quitters never win, and winners never quit,” and you have a powerful social cocktail strong enough to make anyone drunk with the idea that specialization, focus, and grit are the secrets to success.

The problem is, Epstein points out, that the specialization philosophy is false, and he talks to researchers who have the data to back this up. While stories of the prodigies are full of drama and uplifting sentiment, they are the exception. For every Mozart or Tiger Woods in the world, there are a host of others who started late, experimented and searched, bashed around from one subject to the next, from discipline to discipline, building a breadth of experience until, finally, they found something that worked best for them, and rose to excellence. By far, the majority of “early specialization” kids, though they outmatch their fellows in early years, fall behind as they mature, ending up on the B-lists. And this happens not only in sports and music, but across the spectrum of subjects and skills.

More important to educators and parents, in my view, is the research that shows that teaching methods which bring quick progress are actually detrimental to long-term learning. By making it easy to learn something, anything, we affect the retention and the depth of learning. This is especially frustrating because every parent, every teacher wants to see their children and students progress and become engaged in learning, and that’s incredibly difficult to deny when the best learning comes slowly, with failure and difficulty along the way, bringing frustration to everyone involved.

Additionally, in Range, we see how the human mind has grown during the modernization of our civilization, and how we as a species have moved from purely experiential knowledge into the realms of the abstract and conceptualization. And it is nothing short of fascinating to me.

I think it would be for you, as well, and recommend this book strongly.

k