The conventional message maintains that to attain
genuine excellence in any area—sports, music, science, whatever—you have to
specialize and specialize early. You
need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice that is supposedly necessary for
breakout achievement.
Epstein’s book
effectively challenges this conventional thinking: Breadth is the
ally of depth, not its enemy, the hedgehog and the fox working together
is the best combination in problem-solving. In the most rewarding domains
of life, generalists are better positioned than specialists to excel.
In the opening of the book, where Epstein contrasts
Tiger Woods with Roger Federer. Woods’s rise to greatness exemplifies early and
fiercely single-minded specialization: golf, golf, golf, from the age of two.
Federer’s typifies the opposite: a casual interest in a succession of sports —
skiing, basketball, soccer — with an eventual focus on tennis that left him
starting well behind his teenage peers.
Why did the
hyperspecialized “Tiger path” lead to stardom in the one case and the
meandering “Roger path” in the other? Epstein points to the nature of the two
sports. Golf (he claims) is a more specific skill than tennis: It is less
dynamic, with a narrower set of patterns, and hence more rewarding of
repetitive practice. Specialists flourish in such “kind” learning environments,
where patterns recur and feedback is quick and accurate. By contrast,
generalists flourish in “wicked” learning environments, where patterns are
harder to discern and feedback is delayed and/or inaccurate.
Golf, chess, classical-music performance, firefighting
and anesthesiology are (in this sense) kind learning environments; tennis and
jazz are less kind; emergency-room medicine, technological innovation and
geopolitical forecasting are downright wicked — as is much of the rest of
modern life. And it’s getting wickeder: So Epstein’s many examples from
corporate culture, higher education, and the space program seem to suggest.
Increasingly the advantage is going to generalists who have broad integrative
skills.
My Notes:
Epstein’s thesis
is that in some domains and for some problems—problems that he calls ‘wicked,’ are
problems that don’t adhere to a predictable pattern—being a generalist with a
breadth of knowledge and experience is often preferable to being a specialist
skilled in a single domain when dealing with 'wicked' problems. This
includes things like music and sports, where Epstein shows that ‘sampling’
early on—playing multiple sports or trying, different instruments—ultimately
benefits those who go on to become acknowledged masters.
Pg. 8: The
necessity of hyperspecialization forms the core of a vast and sometimes
well-meaning marketing machine in sports and beyond. Allegedly, Tiger Woods began golfing at the
age of two and attributes his success to his head start. On the other hand, Roger Federer dabbled in
skiing, wrestling, swimming, basketball—anything that involved a ball. His parents had no particular athletic
aspirations for him. In his teens, he
began to gravitate towards tennis and by his mid-thirties (when most in tennis
had retired) he was ranked number one in the world.
So, Tiger and Federer have completely different stories and encompass
the theme of this book: specialization (the 10,000 hours kind) is fine; being a
generalist is also fine, and sometime essential. In fact, as this book documents, the Roger
Federer's path to stardom is far more prevalent than the Tiger path.
Pg. 11: The
author finds that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that
they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a
dangerous combination. He was stunned
when cognitive psychologists led him to an enormous and too often ignored the body
of work demonstrating that learning
itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that
means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks
inefficient; it looks like falling behind.
Pg. 13: The challenge we all face today is how to
maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary
thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes,
even demands hyperspecialization.
Pg. 20f:
Kahneman and Klein found that whether or not experience inevitably led
to expertise depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and
poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or
political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. Domains in which instinctive pattern
recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Hogarth termed ‘kind’ learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback
is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.
Golf and chess are great examples where specialization and constant
practice (repetition) pays off. That is
until IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.
Kahneman focused on the flip side of Kind learning
environments: Hogarth called them ‘wicked.’
In Wicked domains the rules of
the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive
patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed,
inaccurate, or both. Losing to Deep Blue
gave Garry Kasparov the idea, what
intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently
have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
Garry proposed teaming up with a computer. He found
that a human pared with a computer can beat any computer.
Pg. 32:
Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to
have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national
academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their
vocation. And those who have won the
Nobel Prize are more likely still. Nobel
laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur
actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer.
Pg. 38f: The Flynn effect (published in 1987)—the
increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth
century—has found that three points are added every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were
compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th
percentile. It appears that most if
not all the improvement involves areas involving abstract words or tasks. The huge Raven’s Progressive Matrices show
that today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a
previously learned method for doing so.
Pg. 53: Most
people are entirely capable of learning from experience but may fail at
learning without experience. And that is
what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that
can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
Today the more constrained and
repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great
rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem
or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.
The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training.
Pg. 94f: Interleaving is a process where students mix,
or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study in order to improve
their learning. Blocked practice, on the other hand, involves studying one
topic very thoroughly before moving to another topic. Interleaving has been
shown to improve inductive reasoning.
When presented with different examples mixed together, students learn to
create abstract generalizations that allow them to apply what they learned to
material they have never encountered before.
Interestingly, 80 percent of students were sure they had learned better
with blocked than mixed practice whereas 80 percent performed in a manner that
proved the opposite. The feeling of
learning, it turns out, is based on before-our-eyes progress, while deep
learning is not.
Pg. 112: In a
kind learning environment, like chess masters or firefighters, rather than
beginning by generating options, they leap to a decision based on pattern
recognition of surface features.
Evaluating an array of options before letting intuition reign is a trick
for the wicked world.
Pg. 116f:
Kepler showed up to work at Tycho Brahe’s observatory and was assigned
to determining why Mars’ orbit, that had to be a circle, did not conform. It took him five years. The assignment that no-one had wanted became
Kepler’s keyhole view into a new understanding of the universe—he reinvented
astronomy and was the first to publish a defense of the Copernican system
(1596).
Pg. 139: In the
industrial era firms were highly specialized, with employees generally tackling
the same suite of challenges repeatedly.
Both the culture of the time—pensions were pervasive and job switching
might be viewed as disloyal—and specialization were barriers to worker mobility
outside of the company. Plus, there was
little incentive for companies to recruit from outside when employees regularly
faced kind learning environments, the type where repetitive experience alone
leads to improvement. By the 1980s,
corporate culture was changing. The knowledge
economy created overwhelming demand for employees with talents for
conceptualization and knowledge creation. Broad conceptual skills now helped in an array
of jobs, and suddenly control over career trajectory shifted from the employer,
who looked inward at a ladder of opportunity, to the employee, who peered out
at a vast web of possibility. In the
private sector, an efficient talent market rapidly emerged as workers shuffled
around in pursuit of match quality. While the world changed, the Army stuck
with the industrial-era ladder, but is just recently starting to change
through items like The Officer Career Satisfaction Program.
Pg. 157fff: The most momentous personality
changes occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties, so specializing early is a task of predicting match quality for a
person who does not yet exist. It
would work, but it makes for worse odds.
Plus, while personality change slows, it does not stop at any age. Sometimes it can actually happen instantly. (The correlation for a particular personality
trait between an individual’s teen years and the individual’s older age is
typically around 0.2-0.3).
Pg. 178: InnoCentive is an example of today’s
innovative problem-solving approach when all the specialists available are
stumped. InnoCentive is an open
innovation and crowdsourcing company. It
enables organizations to put their unsolved problems, which are framed as
‘Challenges’, out to the crowd to address. In the case of InnoCentive, the
crowd can either be external (i.e. their network of over 380,000 problem
solvers) or internal (i.e. an organization's employees, partners or customers).
Awards, typically monetary, are given for submissions that meet the
requirements set out in the Challenge description. The average award amount for
a Challenge is $20,000 but some offer awards of over $100,000. To date,
InnoCentive has run over 2,000 external Challenges and over 1,000 internal
Challenges, awarding over $20 million in the process
Pg. 206: A
subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers in a decade long study found that there
was no statistically significant relationship between R&D spending and
performance. Performance included
measures of sale growth, profit from innovation, shareholder return, and
market-capitalization. Seeding the soil
for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than
money. It takes opportunity.
Pg. 208: The
comic book industry afforded a well-defined era of creative explosion. From the mid-1950s to 1970, comic creators
agreed to self-censor after psychiatrist Fredric Wertham convinced Congress
that comics were causing children to become deviants. (Wertham manipulated or fabricated aspects of
his research.). In 1971, Marvel Comics broke ranks and the first, and highly
successful, graphic novel emerged.
Pg. 217: The
proportion of people who are undernourished has never been as low as it is
today. In the 1960s, 50 of every 100,000
global citizens died annually from famine; now that number is 0.5. Also, population growth rates are declining
rapidly.
Professor Paul Ehrlich (born 1932) became well known
for his controversial 1968 book The
Population Bomb, in which he famously stated: The battle to feed all of
humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to
death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date
nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. (Malthus in 1798 made much the same
prediction for the near future of that time).
Pg. 229: Of
course specialists (hedgehogs), experts, are also necessary. Einstein was a hedgehog. He saw implicitly beneath complexity and
found elegant theories to prove it. But
he also spent the last thirty years of his life in a rigid quest for a single
theory of everything that would explain away the messy apparent randomness
inherent to quantum mechanics a field spawned in part by his own work.
Pg. 245: There was some evidence that the Challenger should not fly. But it was not in quantitative data, it was a
qualitative assessment based on a few photographs taken of joints that had soot
trapped in them. One was at a cool
temperature, and one was at a rather warm temperature. However, reason without numbers was not
accepted and NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools.
Pg. 259: NASA’s
entrenched process culture persisted in spite of the Challenger. NASA’s only
other fatal shuttle accident, the space shuttle Columbia disintegration in
2003, was a cultural carbon copy of the Challenger. The Columbia
disaster engendered an even stronger ill-fated congruence between process
accountability and group-focused norms.
When concerned engineers went to the Department of Defense to request
high-resolution photographs of a part of the shuttle they thought was damaged,
not only did NASA managers block outside assistance but they apologized to DOD
for contact outside ‘proper channels.’
Again, lower-ranking engineers had concerns they could not quantify;
they stayed silent because ‘the requirement for data was stringent and
inhibiting.’
Pg. 266f:
Interventional cardiologists specialize in treating chest pain by
placing stents—a metal tube that pries open blood vessels. Except, repeatedly, randomized clinical
trials that compared stents with more conservative forms of treatment show that
stents for patients with stable chest
pain prevent zero heart attacks and extend the lives of patients a grand total
of not at all.
Similarly, harrowing findings are now appearing all
over medicine, wherever specialties have arisen for the use of a particular
tool. One of the most common orthopedic
surgeries in the world involves shaving a torn meniscus—a piece of cartilage in
the knee—back to its original crescent shape.
However, five orthopedic clinics in Finland found that sham surgery
worked just as well.
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