Lessons from Range by David Epstein

I received an email from Ryan Holiday – author of The Obstacle is the Way, a wonderful book that introduced me to Stoic philosophy as a guiding principle. In that email, he recommended Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. As a generalist, the title intrigued me. So as I am prone to do, I bought the Audible version, and over a 10 day period, listened to the book. Like many books in this genre, one can criticize the trees of his argument, but I think he gets the forest right. This website has a collection of reviews, many of which are somewhat critical. Nonetheless, I found that his stories helped me understand much of my personal success and happiness with my career. The book has several major points. He makes a reasoned argument that for complex careers (be it sports, arts, business or medicine) one benefits from starting with breadth. Unless one is working towards expertise in a “kind problem” (examples, chess and golf), then a variety of experiences allows one to discover where they want to specialize. Often early specialization fails because as we grow, we too often find that the early specialization ignores the most important success attribute – finding ones passion. As I think of my career, I “flirted” with many majors in college prior to settling on psychology. Then for the first 2.5 years of medical school I again dated several specialties. After a week on the internal medicine rotation, I...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs