

Kahneman concluded that there was a complete disconnect between experience and performance. Crucially, as the recruiters received more and more feedback after multiple recruitment rounds, they didn’t get any better at making predictions. Studying the assessment of officer candidates in the Israeli Defence Forces, he found that recruiters’ predictions of a recruit’s future performance, based on physical and mental abilities, were no more reliable than guesswork. For firefighters, for example, years of focused experience trains them to recognize patterns in the behavior of flames, which enables them to make 80 percent of their on-the-job decisions instinctively in seconds.īut Kahneman found that in other areas, experience counted for nothing. Klein shows that experience counts in certain fields. In a 2009 paper, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein explored the connection between experience and performance. In many walks of life, building up experience in just one field doesn’t help performance. The writer and surgeon Atul Gawande notes that when doctors joke about right-ear surgeons, we shouldn’t be so quick to assume they don’t actually exist.īut is specializing really the way to go? Simply put, no. Rather, they specialize in cancer of a particular organ. Oncologists, for example, now rarely focus on cancer alone. In fact, it’s also true of academia, our complex financial system and medicine. This trend toward specialization doesn’t only show up in the sports world. Tiger Woods embodies a now popular idea that the key to success in life is to specialize, get a head start and practice intensively. Later that same year, he entered and won his first tournament in the under ten category. At two, he showed off his golf drive on national television. why you should be a Roger, not a Tiger.Īt the age of ten months old, Tiger Woods picked up his first miniature golf club.how the complexity of modern life has changed the way we think and.what comic books have to tell us about the ingredients of success.In this summary of Range by David Epstein, you’ll learn They also show that experts often judge their own fields more narrowly than open-minded, intellectually curious amateurs do. This makes them more innovative and, ultimately, more impactful.ĭrawing on examples from medicine to academia to sport, this book summary explore how breadth and range are far more powerful than specialized expertise. Generalists may take a little longer to find their path in life, but they are more creative, can make connections between diverse fields that specialists cannot. But delve a little deeper, and it becomes clear that it’s generalists, not specialists, who are primed to excel.

Many successful people, such as Tiger Woods, start to focus on one path early in life. In our complex and cutthroat world, there’s a lot of pressure to get a head start and specialize early.
