A review by drkottke
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

5.0

Tired of hearing the 10,000 hours metric on expertise? Feeling disempowered by the eminent achievements of brilliant younger people and wondering where your time went? Discover an alternative framework for thinking about talent and success. Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future described "The Disciplinary Mind" in which one masters a single body of knowledge, and this depth of expertise is indeed necessary in our world. It requires the kind of dedication to a single specialized pursuit as described in Outliers. However, that's only one of the five minds that Gardner posited as necessarily interdependent in the modern world. At least three other minds described in Gardner's book - "The Synthesizing Mind," "The Creative Mind," and "The Respectful Mind" - are defined by a breadth of knowledge, experience, and perspective that can integrate thinking across diverse fields to create novel solutions to vexing problems. Joseph Campbell observed in The Power of Myth that the blessings of any given faith's promised afterlife might elude him, given his stance as a generalist across mythologies and religions rather than as a devout follower of any single path. While Range doesn't say anything about the afterlife, it does affirm that Campbell's meandering curiosity is a virtue in this life.