David Epstein

When you are learning, you want it to be hard. Do this through desirable difficulties: testing yourself, the generation effect, spaced repetition, interleaving of practice.

Think of how you can apply current knowledge to new problems. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.

Stay open-minded about solutions that come from outside of your domain and expertise. Think of it as “having one foot outside your world.”

Instead of jumping to specialize immediately, accumulate experience in different domains.

A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun

Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient.

Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts.

Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light, and allows humans to reason through problems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts.

Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.

The psychologists highlighted the variety of paths to excellence, but the most common was a sampling period, often lightly structured with some lessons and a breadth of instruments and activities, followed only later by a narrowing of focus, increased structure, and an explosion of practice volume.

The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training. Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer.

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.

Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’”

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. When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly.

In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. There are domains beyond chess in which massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition.

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

Increasing specialization has created a system of parallel trenches in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.

Many studies have showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed.

One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.

We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it.

Tiger’s (Tiger Woods) incredible upbringing has been at the heart of a batch of bestselling books on the development of expertise, one of which was a parenting manual written by Tiger’s father, Earl.

Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

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.

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses.

Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Used for learning, testing, including self-testing, is a very desirable difficulty.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, 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.