This book attempts to answer a specific question about education: is it better to go deep and specialize in one specific field of study, or is it better to go broad and learn about a wide variety of topics? The answer is that there is no singular answer; it depends on the circumstances.
Before answering the question, Epstein identifies two different learning environments: kind and wicked. In kind learning environments the rules are clear and unchanging and the feedback is quick and tightly connected to your actions. The quintessential game learned in a kind environment is chess, where every move made provides immediate feedback on its consequences and the rules never change. Another kind learning environment examined in the book is golf, where practice, repetition, and pattern recognition pave the way forward for students of the game. Conversely to chess and golf, in wicked learning environments, the rules can be subjective, constantly shifting, or altogether absent, and the feedback from decisions made can be ambiguous or inaccurate. Examples of wicked learning environments are politics, dating, or diagnosing a patient and prescribing medicine. These learning environments require critical thinking and conceptual reasoning because they often have no right or wrong answers to problems, only better or worse outcomes. For example, prescribing two different patients with the same medication to treat the same illness may not result in both recovering: perhaps one will recover while the other has an allergic reaction and gets worse.
Do you want to be a professional golfer like Tiger Woods? Then you should start young and focus all of your attention on golf. Do you want to be a doctor? Then you need to study medicine, but you should also keep your interests somewhat broader so as to foster critical thinking and aid your pattern recognition. One example used in the book was taken from two different groups of scientists in two different laboratories both trying to solve the same problem. One group of scientists were all biologists, while the other group of scientists consisted of one biologist, one chemist, one physicist, one mathematician, and one statistician. The more diverse group of scientists solved the problem faster because they were thinking about the problem from five different points of view, as opposed to the group of biologists who all thought about the problem in the same way. This example can also be used in terms of the individual: the more specialized someone’s knowledge, the more constrained they are to that specialized way of thinking; the broader someone’s knowledge base is, the more diverse their thinking patterns will be. Specialists may be able to answer the most complex problems in their field, but generalists are often better at solving problems that exist between fields of study—including problems that are new and unseen.
When writing about professional musicians, Epstein notes how contrary to popular belief, many great performers do not spend their childhood devoted to a single instrument. Instead, they often spend years experimenting with a variety of different instruments and styles before eventually picking one to specialize in. “The sampling period is not incidental to the development of great performers,” he writes, “it is often integral to their success.” This same principle appears in the world of sports—Epstein compares and contrasts Tiger Woods’ ascendancy in golf with that of Roger Federer’s in tennis. Tiger’s life story is the quintessential one of specialization: his father recognized his interest in golf when he was a toddler and set him on a path towards success that never wavered. Federer, on the other hand, played many sports as a child including soccer, basketball, badminton, and others. He was not considered a prodigy at a young age and spent his youth developing a broad range of athletic skills from a variety of sports. Eventually, he fully committed to tennis as a teenager. The point that Epstein is making with this comparison is not that one strategy is better than the other, but that we as a society have come to cherish Tiger’s story and downplay Federer’s as we over-value specialization in our children in the hopes of giving them a competitive edge in adulthood. The expression ‘young and foolish’ describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, “but it is not foolish at all,” Epstein writes, “it is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential reward is extremely high. Thanks to constant feedback and an unforgiving weed-out process, those who try will learn quickly if they might be a match, at least compared to jobs with less constant feedback. If they aren’t a match, they go test something else, and continue to gain information about their options and themselves.”
Children are the biggest learners in a society and a large portion of this book examines how we as a society raise them, specifically the dangers of our current educational system that is geared towards early specialization and away from nurturing a broad range of interests. This is not a wise system as children (and adults) are subject to change. Who among us is exactly the same person today as we were when we were 16-years-old? Who among us has the same interests and wants the same things now that we did back then? People change throughout the course of a life, and Epstein believes that our approach to education should reflect this reality. If we don’t, and continue to focus our attention on early hyper-specialization, what kinds of adults are we as a society likely to produce?
Throughout the book, Epstein argues that the process of experimentation (especially for young people) is not a detour from success, but often the very pathway to it. Many people only discover where they fit in after first trying a bunch of things and figuring out where they don’t. Epstein does not argue that specialization is inherently bad, but that we have become overly enamored with it and often push children toward narrow expertise before they have had a chance to discover who they are and what their interests are. In a world increasingly defined by complex and unpredictable problems, breadth of experience may be more valuable than we realize. This book serves as a reminder that wandering is not always wasted time; sometimes it is the very process by which we discover what our interests truly are and where in society we belong.
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