Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
David Epstein
0735214506
Table of Contents
- The Cult of the Head Start
- How Wicked the World Was Made
- When Less of the Same is More
- Learning, Fast and Slow
- Thinking Outside Experience
- The Trouble with Too Much Grit
- Flirting With Your Possible Selves
- The Outsider Advantage
- Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology
- Fooled by Expertise
- Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools
- Deliberate Amateurs
- Expanding Your Range
Notes
AI systems are like savants. They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all 72 solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did. The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules” – that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.
They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack…In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new. In the lone lab that did not make any new findings during Dunbar’s project, everyone had similar and highly specialized backgrounds, and analogies were almost never used.
A class at the University of Washington titled “Calling Bullshit” focused on broad principles fundamental to understanding the interdisciplinary world and critically evaluating the daily firehose of information…I use Fermi thinking regularly, breaking down a problem so I can leverage what little I know to start investigating what I don’t, a “similarities” problem of sorts.
The psychologists highlighted the variety of paths to excellence, but the most common was a sampling period, often lightly structured with some lessons and a breadth of instruments and activities, followed only later by a narrowing of focus, increased structure, and an explosion of practice volume.
…successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.
Godin argued that “winners” – he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain – quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”…When a junior officer changed direction and left the Army, it did not signal a loss of drive. It signaled that a strong drive for personal development had changed the officer’s goals entirely.
“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” (Hesselbein) repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.
Serial innovators
- High tolerance for ambiguity
- Systems thinkers
- Additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains
- Repurposing what is already available
- Adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process
- Ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways
- Synthesizing information from many different sources
- They appear to flit among ideas
- They read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests.
- Need to learn significantly across multiple domains.
- Communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.
In professional networks, that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators.
InnoCentive
Analogies
Far Transfer
Sampling Period
Match Quality