For some time, I’ve considered writing a blog post about the usefulness of Amazon book recommendations (or lack thereof). On the one hand, I’d be dead in the water without my Kindle. On the other hand, I’m completely baffled by some of the recommendations Amazon sends my way. More specifically, some of these recommendations repeat themselves even though I’ve told Amazon I’m not interested in them.
One book continued to appear on my radar screen despite my efforts. However, Amazon wasn’t the only entity to bring up this particular book. Ryan Holiday interviewed this book’s author for his Daily Stoic website. Listeners of another podcast I enjoy, Deep Questions with Cal Newport, also frequently brought the book up. Since this wasn’t just an Amazon recommendation, but a book recommended by two different writers I respect, I decided to give it a whirl.
The book is Range by David Epstein.
Range is Epstein’s second book, but the topic of his first book might help to explain the topic of the second. The first book is called The Sports Gene, which is a logical extension of Epstein’s “career” (shudder quotes deliberate—more on that later) as a writer for Sports Illustrated. I’ve not read that book and thus have no grounds to praise or criticise it. The only reason I mention it is because the topic gave me pause.
“Why on earth is a sports writer jumping over to pop science after only a few years between the two?” The shift in topics didn’t raise my eyebrow, his timing did.
And as it turned out, my eyebrow would stay cocked for the entirety of the book.
What’s In It, Pros and Cons
Epstein’s book is an ambitious one given the current cultural zeitgeist. For the past decade or so, countless books, no doubt started by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, have been pushing some variant of the “10,000 rule”, the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is the time it takes for someone to become an expert in a particular domain.
Not surprisingly, such a position comes with a ton of caveats, asterisks, and other assorted footnotes. Epstein is taking Gladwell and others in the 10,000 hour camp to task for these caveats.
With that in mind, what exactly is in Epstein’s book? In addition to pushing back against the 10,000 rule (sort of), Epstein tries to make the case for having “range”( i.e. numerous skills). The results are bizarre.
And that leads me to the main point of this review: David Epstein undermined his own book by advocating the position he did.
Epstein’s Position
Epstein’s clearest objective in this book is pushing back against the idea of “specialising” early and in one particular subject. The performer Epstein uses to illustrate this “specialist” line of thinking is Tiger Woods, who famously began golfing at two years old and went on to become the best golfer in the world.
Epstein indicates that this kind of example is the exception, not the rule. Instead, most experts followed a path similar to how Roger Federer became the best tennis player in the world. Federer tried his hand at a bunch of a different sports before settling on tennis. According to the 10,000 hour philosophy, Federer shouldn’t be the best tennis player in the world because he didn’t start as early compared to his peers.
Therefore, Epstein’s book tries to make the case for a “Federer style” of success by examining the newest psychological and performative science about the virtues of having “range”. In the process, Epstein makes some excellent points about the dangers of being too narrow. Chief among these dangers is “over-specialisation”.
In many fields, most infamously academia, there are some practitioners specialising in a subject so niche and individual that nobody can benefit from them. These people are worse than useless, according to Epstein. For example, English professors these days might not be studying “Victorian Literature”, a reasonable specialty, but rather “The Underlying Grand Narrative In The Works Of Charles Dickens in 1843 and 1844 Compared To Marxist Theory.” Admittedly that is an exaggeration, but people of that mould are becoming increasingly common.
Another excellent critique about doing things the “Tiger Woods” way relates to the importance of a “sampling period”—the incredibly common phase whereby people test out several interests before they land on the right one. Federer, for example, sampled with just about every sport available before throwing his lot in with tennis. Specialising too early can lead to stagnation and frustration later on down the road.
Still another excellent critique of the “narrow” path relates to the nature of modern work. Perhaps Epstein’s strongest argument for not doing things too narrowly has to do with the “kind” vs “wicked” nature of modern work. The quoted words are specifically related to the types of work environments most people find themselves in. A “kind” environment is found in arenas like chess, tennis, and golf, where the rules are defined and there is an objectively correct outcome (practice your swing to get that hole in one, checkmate your opponent).
“Wicked” environments by contrast are found in places like Wall Street, where the rules are constantly changing, the idea of success is tough to nail down, and creativity is a constantly changing requirement. Being too specialised will serve one poorly in such an environment.
I could go on and on as Epstein is eager to share every possible argument for this “ranged” way of going through the world, but that is exactly Epstein’s problem.
And Then He Undermined His Own Book
With his unique argument and promising research, Epstein’s tome should be the easiest book to recommend. There is just one problem: by being the epitome of “range and generalisation”, Epstein’s writing style is nowhere near up to the standard needed to make his point in the clear, convincing, and sophisticated manner demanded by his subject matter.
It would be hypocritical of Epstein to write a book advocating “range” if he himself didn’t have a ranged background and boy does he ever. He was initially a science major who wound up in the Arctic to study the local fauna. Then he shifted into a journalism MA at Columbia before trying his hand as a crime writer for a New York newspaper. Following another shift in his life, he became a sports journalist for Sports Illustrated which led to his first book, The Sports Gene. After critiquing Malcolm Gladwell and having a debate with him about the 10,000 hour rule, his interest shifted again, this time to psychological science. That in turn, led to this book about generalisation.
What’s wrong with this biography? Writing skills take years and years to develop in a deliberate way, exactly in the specialist manner Epstein argues against. By jumping around in all of those different fields, Epstein undermined his own book by writing it in a less-than-optimal way.
And this non-expert performance shows. In the above section, I listed three points from Epstein’s book that stood out to me but they are barely scratching the surface of the anecdotes, interviews, and scientific studies Epstein has commandeered to back up his point(s). There are so many that no reasonable reader can keep track of them.
There are 12 chapters in the book plus an introduction and conclusion, but the number of examples is overwhelming; there is plainly not enough room to give each example the attention it deserves. I haven’t talked about Epstein’s discussion regarding eighteenth century female Venetian musicians, Nintendo’s shift into video games in the ‘80s, how students learn in classrooms, the inability of Russian peasants to grasp abstract reasoning, the story of Vincent Van Gogh (that anecdote was particularly tortured), a discussion about “superforecaster” Philip Tetlock, Copernicus and the nature of analogies, and on and on it goes.
One might say that isn’t a problem. After all, wouldn’t having a wealth of sources further support his argument? In theory yes, but not all sources are of equal weight or value. And so, what should be an advantage turned into a huge disadvantage for Epstein as each point didn’t have the space it needed to support his argument. Since Epstein is in favour of unusual analogies in the style of Copernicus, allow me to use one of my own to demonstrate his problem.
Consider Apollo 13. For those who don’t know the history, this Apollo mission went wrong, and the crew escaped disaster by the skin of their teeth. One of the many failures in the mission concerned the carbon dioxide filters. See, the spaceship had a limited oxygen supply for the crew and thus the crew needed a way of clearing out the poisonous carbon dioxide they exhaled. Usually, a filter cleared it away. However, the filter on Apollo 13 was damaged and they needed to fix it.
If the filter stayed broken, then every breath the crew drew in depleted the amount of breathable air on the ship. If too much carbon dioxide stayed in the cabin, the crew would run out of oxygen. In short, there was high drama trying to fix those filters so the crew of Apollo 13 would have enough air to get back home.
Returning to Epstein,, a chapter in his book is like one of those NASA’s spaceships. There is only so much oxygen available within a chapter, and each bit of evidence takes up more and more of that oxygen. Since Epstein CRAMS his book with so many different anecdotes and sources, none of them have enough room to breathe. That discussion about Nintendo took away from the point about having a “sampling period” and vice-versa. Neither is given the space needed for me, the reader, to fully benefit from the example. When you multiply all of the different anecdotes Epstein utilises and you can see how the book runs out of oxygen very quickly.
What The Book Needed
Part of the reason Epstein’s book is so popular now has to do with its (supposedly) irreconcilable difference with the the “10,000 hour/expert performance” school advocated by Anders Ericsson. Both Epstein and Ericsson have points as Tiger Woods and Roger Federer are both outstanding athletes who reached the top in opposite ways. So what gives?
Well, at the risk of overreaching myself, allow me to briefly say how I thought Epstein’s book would go. What I thought Epstein would do is indicate that the way to master those more difficult practice areas would be to utilise examples from other fields to prevent the omnipresent danger of plateauing. Additionally, I expected a pushback against practicing “specialisation techniques” in insular bubbles. For example, practicing golf is an insular practice. There are objective rules, but, as Epstein smartly mentioned, objective rules are far from universal in most careers.
In my experience, though I’m willing to be wrong about this, the people Epstein highlights as being talented in a wide-range of areas got there by mastering particular skills one at a time and then were exposed to a different range of ideas which started from the foundation of their one area of expertise. Roger Federer wasn’t starting as a completely blank slate when he began playing tennis. He was familiar with athletics, confident in his choice, and, once he committed to the sport, practiced with coaches and trainers of increasing talent and expertise, leading to a rich collaboration not to mention countless victories at Wimbledon. But the fact that Epstein’s book was so hazy that I, and many other readers, accidentally created a false dichotomy between the “Tiger Woods” approach and the “Roger Federer” approach indicates the weaknesses of the book.
Conclusion
The most common pushback against generalists is, rightly in my opinion, that they are too shallow and that they don’t invest enough into the rare and valuable skills the modern economy is so hungry for. Having more than one skill under your belt shouldn’t come at the cost of crucial gaps in topical understanding. Epstein’s book, by having so many examples without the needed space to fully explore them, has those crucial gaps in understanding. He may not be wrong arguing for range, but his knowledge felt seriously incomplete. If you read the book, you’ll walk away with a few prizes, but a coherent argument for range isn’t one of them.