Range
How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
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4.1 • 40 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'A goldmine of surprising insights. Makes you smarter with every page' – James Clear, author of Atomic Habits
The fifth-anniversary edition of the instant Sunday Times bestseller, as featured on Diary of a CEO.
The essential guide to improving your performance, and a powerful playbook for success in any field: develop range while everyone around you is rushing to specialize.
You may have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization, and 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. If you only dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong.
In this landmark book, David Epstein shows you that the way to succeed is by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly and juggling many interests.
Studying the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors and scientists, Epstein demonstrates how generalists often find their path relatively late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one.
Range has challenged the status quo, reshaped career paths, inspired parents and changed lives. Read it to learn how to be more creative, more agile, and more capable of making the connections that your more specialized peers cannot see.
‘If you're a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you' – Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2019
'I loved Range' – Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and self-identified generalist Epstein (The Sports Gene) delivers an enjoyable if not wholly convincing work of Gladwellian pop-psychology aimed at showing that specialization is not the only path to success. His survey finds no shortage of notable athletes, artists, inventors, and businesspeople who followed atypically circuitous paths. Some are household names, such as J.K. Rowling, who by her own admission "failed on an epic scale" before deciding to pursue writing, and Duke Ellington, who briefly studied music as a child before becoming more interested in basketball and drawing, only returning to music after a chance encounter with ragtime. Others are more obscure, such as Nintendo's Gunpei Yokoi, who turned his limitations as an electronics engineer to his advantage when he created the cheap-to-produce, durable Game Boy, and Jack Cecchini, "one of the rare musicians who is world class in both jazz and classical." Epstein's narrative case studies are fascinating, but the rapid-fire movement from one sketch to the next can create the impression of evidence in search of a thesis. While this well-crafted book does not entirely disprove the argument for expertise, Epstein does show that, for anyone without 10,000 hours to devote to mastering a single skill, there is hope yet.
