My 5 star review of
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein :-
Spoiler:
'Range' is a crowd pleaser, first of all. I have always wondered what my life would be if I had lived up to my early academic promise. I would be a believer in God. I would be married, have kids. Go abroad for holidays probably. Most of these things are not reflective of me nowadays. I am living a life that seems to fit the mantra of Range's assumption, but is that a truth, or is the fact that I am trying to learn a few skills, merely being a Jack of few trades?
This is a wonderful nonfiction book. I am almost 100 % convinced of its claims. It makes sense. At one point, one of the scientists, Arturo Casadevall, gives us a hypothetical scenario where a weirdly self folding protein molecule in a cucumber might be of value. This reminded me of Michael Crichton's The Lost World. The Lost World for me is better than Jurassic Park. I love the science disseminated in it. Crichton himself is mentioned as a subject in Range. He tried to study medicine in his youth. The knowledge gathered there helped him become a writer, and a showrunner in ER, a TV show.
Range tries to show us that specializing in a domain leads to lack of success generally. Budding musicians fare far better when they are learning more than two instruments. This is shown in the example of Maria Del Pieta and her 'group', way back in the tail end of the Renaissance. Being specialized means being deep, while being a generalist means being broad in the field one is affiliated with. This latter concept is explained a few times in the book, and the subject stayed fresh for me because the topic is one I have been wondering all my life. I surmise that this is the case with other readers.
The Beatles were generalists. They did not specialise in one genre. They grew up with rock and roll music. They were inspired by myriad gifted black musicians. They combined their idols' styles to create a poppy sounding music that they galvanised in their own songwriting talent. Still in music, when one of the members of Radiohead was interviewed about why there are not enough innovative and creative guitarists in the US, he replied that there, guitar magazines sell really well. This means that learners try to get technical too early and too fast. Parents who want their children to succeed in sports want their offsprings to do what the Olympians are doing right now, instead of what the latter have done when they themselves were kids.
There is a former reviewer called J.G. Keely on Goodreads who held the most unpopular opinions. He is the most intellectual person I have engaged in conversation with. So, e.g. he gave 1 star to Game of Thrones. He gave 3 stars to LoTR and thrashed talked Harry Potter. It is clear to everyone that by most metrics, Game of Thrones is not a 1 star book. Yet Keely was able to defend himself - successfully - against the fans of that book. He could do so because he had so many weapons to choose from, so many types of rhetoric, and he displayed such a superior reasoning capacity that none of his detractors could 'unsaddle' him, so to speak. Keely was able to defend his stance because he was a specialist. He wielded language like a whip. If one has so much knowledge of a particular area, one will often be able to fit any opinion in that area of expertise.
This happened to people who were asked to predict the future. Predicting, say, next week's stock exchange's numbers is almost as hard as guessing about the future in national events that would form history. Not only that, but the specialists who got their predictions wrong doubled downed on their input and insisted that they will be right next week. They never even get close. Parents who want super achiever kids too reacted strongly to Range's tenet. Informed that generalists do better than specialists, these adults meet this info with disbelief. They had been taught that to keep on trying, relentlessly, in one field, is a sign of progress.
Range is a great book. But my puny achievements in art and life are far removed from the types of musicians who are readily mentioned here. This book can help me learn languages. I only need to mix it up a bit and multitask. Whenever an innovative idea is met with resistance in a few disciplines, we see cracks appearing in our worldview. This aspect is not covered by the book. It is my opinion. Take the example of NASA's failure with the Challenger launch disaster. When the entire body of scientists got upended, cracks started to appear and we finally get to know that even the pursuit of discovery and scientific knowledge is an ideology.
To summarise, Range is a book whose contents I have never stopped wondering about. Range shows us that the best CEO of the last 3 decades was a woman who had no training in management. She worked till at least when she was 101 years old. I like her most of all. It has been a pleasure and a privilege reading this book. It is what I thought Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and what Degrasse Tyson's book, Starry Messenger would be like. My first book of the year, and it is a 5 star one.