The key ideas

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David Epstein, 2019

Tiger Woods picked up a club almost in the cradle. Roger Federer tried nearly every sport there was. Both became the best in the world, yet only the first is held up as the model. David Epstein shows where early, narrow specialization pays off, and where broad experience, a late choice and the habit of carrying ideas from one field to another win instead.

Who it is for

For anyone who has started over more than once and feels they have run out of time. For parents choosing one sport or one instrument for their child for years to come. And for everyone who wants to learn in a way that makes knowledge stick.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren't you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don't let anyone else make you feel behind.

The boy on the TV show and the boy with the strange strokes

Two-year-old Tiger Woods walks onto the stage of an American TV show with a tiny club and hits a ball in front of the whole country. His father had been teaching him golf since he was a baby, and from there the road ran straight: one pursuit, thousands of repetitions, victories. Everyone knows this story. It has been turned into a recipe: start as early as you can, pick one thing and never get distracted.

Around the same time, Roger Federer was growing up in Switzerland. He tried nearly ten sports, from skiing and wrestling to badminton and soccer, and he truly settled on tennis later than many kids his age. Both became the best in the world. But it is almost always the first one we hold up as the example for children.

David Epstein is an American journalist who writes about sports and science. In his 2019 book he asks a simple question: which of the two paths is more common, and where does each one work? He gathered research and the life stories of athletes, musicians, scientists and inventors. His answer is awkward for the cult of the early start. In narrow, predictable fields, early specialization pays off. But in most of life, the winners are people with broad experience, a late choice and the habit of carrying ideas from one field to another.

Ahead are Venetian orphans who played everything, cadets who had it too easy, a chemist who knew about concrete, and an engineer who built the Game Boy out of old parts. You will see where experience teaches and where it misleads, how to learn so that knowledge stays, and why someone who took a long time to find their thing is not necessarily late.

The tennis coach who would not coach her son

Federer's mother was a tennis coach herself. Even so, she refused to coach her son. On the court the boy tried every strange stroke he could think of, and he almost never hit the ball back the way you are supposed to. His parents did not push him toward tennis. If they pushed him at all, it was to take the game less seriously. His father's main rule was short: just don't cheat.

Epstein has a name for this time: the sampling period. A child tries different activities, builds general coordination and slowly learns what truly fits. The studies of athletes' backgrounds that the author cites show that future world-class athletes more often played a variety of sports as children and focused on one later than their peers.

Woods's path is no myth, but in Epstein's view it is the exception rather than the rule. The mistake is to see sampling as wasted time and an early choice as a sign of seriousness. While switching is still cheap, sampling gives you information no test can: what you enjoy, what you are good at and what keeps you going.

This is not only about children. An adult who spent a few years moving between pursuits often feels embarrassed about it. Epstein suggests another way to look at it: sampling is research, and research has results.

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About the author

David Epstein is an American journalist who has written about sports and science for Sports Illustrated and ProPublica. He is also the author of the bestseller The Sports Gene.

All books by this author: David Epstein

Terms from the book

  • Kahneman
  • Federer
  • Davis
  • Drucker
  • Woods
  • typhoid
  • Nintendo
  • Sega
  • Kasparov
  • Outside view
  • Desirable difficulties
  • Kepler
  • Sampling period: A phrase from the book, not a scientific term: the years when a person tries many different activities before settling on one.
  • Hogarth: Robin Hogarth, a psychologist who studies decision making. He drew the line between kind and wicked learning environments.
  • Wicked environment: Robin Hogarth's idea: a setting where the rules are unclear or keep changing, and feedback on what you do comes late or points you the wrong way.
  • Kind environment: Robin Hogarth's idea: a setting where the rules are stable, situations repeat, and results show up quickly and honestly, as in golf or chess.
  • Deep Blue: IBM's chess supercomputer, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a match in 1997.
  • Freestyle chess: Chess tournaments where players may use any help from computer programs, including playing as a team.
  • Ospedale della Pietà: A Venetian orphanage founded in the fourteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was famous for the musical training of its girls.
  • Figlie del coro: Italian for “daughters of the choir”: the girls of the Pietà orphanage in Venice who performed as singers and musicians.
  • Vivaldi: Antonio Vivaldi (1678 to 1741), Italian composer and violinist, author of The Four Seasons. He taught at the Pietà orphanage for many years.
  • US Air Force Academy: A military university in Colorado that trains officers for the United States Air Force.
  • Bjork: Robert Bjork, an American psychologist who studies memory and learning. In 1994 he introduced the idea of desirable difficulties.
  • Gentner: Dedre Gentner, an American psychologist at Northwestern University who studies thinking by analogy.
  • Malamud: Ofer Malamud, an economist who studies education and the labor market. He compared early and late specialization in the United Kingdom.
  • Match quality: An idea from economics that Epstein builds on: how well a job fits a person, their abilities and their interests.
  • Van Gogh: Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890), Dutch painter and one of the leading figures of Post-Impressionism. He took up painting seriously at about 27.
  • Hesselbein: Frances Hesselbein (1915 to 2022), American civic leader who headed the Girl Scouts of the USA from 1976 to 1990.
  • Ibarra: Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior who studies how people change professions and careers.
  • Exxon Valdez: An oil tanker that ran aground on a reef off the coast of Alaska in 1989. The spill became one of the worst environmental disasters in US history.
  • InnoCentive: An online platform where companies and labs post unsolved problems and offer a reward to whoever solves them.
  • Lakhani: Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies open innovation and how outsiders solve hard problems.
  • Yokoi: Gunpei Yokoi (1941 to 1997), Japanese engineer and inventor at Nintendo, creator of the Game & Watch and the Game Boy.
  • Hanafuda: Japanese playing cards decorated with flowers and plants, one suit for each of the twelve months of the year.
  • Ultra Hand: An extending grabber toy invented by Gunpei Yokoi and released by Nintendo in 1966.
  • Game & Watch: A series of Nintendo handheld electronic games released from 1980 on, each with one game and a clock.
  • Lateral thinking with withered technology: Gunpei Yokoi's principle: find new uses for cheap, well-understood technology instead of chasing the newest.
  • Game Boy: Nintendo's handheld game console, released in 1989.
  • Atari: An American company and one of the first makers of video games and consoles. It produced the Lynx handheld.
  • Casadevall: Arturo Casadevall, an American microbiologist and immunologist who chairs a department at Johns Hopkins University.
  • Deliberate amateurs: Epstein's phrase: people who, besides their main specialty, deliberately pick up knowledge and skills from other fields.

All terms

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