RANGE – Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialised World

For my late father and all parents.

Around us at the time when I first got my driver’s license were youth who were… shall we say rather casual, about road safety: “I j-ust dropped my housekeys (while driving). When I looked up, the lamp post was rushing up to meet me.” I was 17, and with no mishaps, had passed my driving tests first try.

My father kept a plain notebook and pen in the glove compartment. Every time I drove with one of my parents in the car, I was to write down how much driving time I’d chalked up, and either parent would sign off. (Pop also printed calendars, splitting up various books he wanted me to read into 15 or 20 pages a day, where I needed to sign each day to confirm I’d read those pages. He threatened to quiz me. He only really did it once with one of the books and, satisfied, never did it again Thank GOODNESS ok, I really HATED the Math and English quizzes!! :D) Anyway, when I reached 100 parent-accompanied driving hours I would be free to take the car out myself. Until then, I was only to drive with a parent with me.

I never made it to 100 hours. Within the year, my parents were checking out dorm life at Catholic Junior College in Singapore for me where, my father happily noted, the rooms were bare and tiny, the showers didn’t have hot water, and because the building was old (this being pre-renovation in the 90s), all plug-in electrical appliances were banned because they tripped the electricity supply. Nonetheless, I had 2 friends who smuggled hot plates in because they wanted warm meals with rice, late in the night. (One girlfriend got caught. When the cooker was returned 10 days later, it still had the food in it 😀 )

The majority of kids around me were ASEAN or Indian or Chinese scholars, ie they were definitely no slouches at academics and no one was about to mess their future up. That is not to say they never got in trouble. Some boys in particular chafed at old hostel warden Father Tseng’s rules being “too strict” and in retaliation, they put an extra padlock over his garage door. He couldn’t get his car out in time for an errand and was super mad, threatening expulsion from the hostel. (He also got really good with heavy duty wire cutters. I remember noticing him from a dorm window once, stalking purposefully in his white robes towards his garage, daring anyone else to leave a padlock for him to find and hack up.)

He also extended personal credit to one of my roommates who had spent several days in a jail-cell for running away pending a parent custody battle. She was trying to find a quiet place to stay to study for the A-Levels. My original room-mate had expedited her own exams so she could enter uni a term early, and so her empty bed was perfect for my new room-mate, who was obviously seriously broke. (Today she is a much-loved public school PE teacher in Singapore, married with 3 kids.)  

I often thought (fine, was indirectly led to believe haha) my family weren’t very well off, financially. I remember worrying my parents couldn’t afford my government grant-subsidised Singapore university degree….. right up until I came home one term vacation to find a new imported car in the drive, alongside their regular one 😀 “THERE I was worrying you guys couldn’t afford my education!!!” “W-ell…. we never SAID that.” <looks at ceiling>   

I tell these stories because being able to recognise the difference between Tough Love, Just Love and Just Tough (No Love), is so important to the quality of your relationships.  Um… Just Love walks a fine line between becoming Just an Excuse to Take The Easy Way Out. For true worship, true honouring, true love is never without sacrifice or difficulty. It’s very easy to tell people whatever the hell they want to hear regardless of how bad it really is for them, if you don’t care what happens to them (kids – remember that, k?).

Life was never meant to be “easy,” because anything you intend to be useful you need to mould, shape, fashion, hone… thereby needing Refiner’s Fire. How else does one create blades, tools, countless objects that contribute to society, lift others up, save lives, delight, entertain, inspire? Otherwise it’s justa useless hunk of metal. Tough, unbreakable maybe. But virtually useless nonetheless. Doesn’t float. Certainly can’t fly. Oh wait, you need extensive metalworking to shape those wings, also an engineering degree, preferably from MIT, if you’re gonna work on the engine, various certifications if you’re going to fly the thing… because no one entrusts responsibility to the irresponsible or untrustworthy. Why on earth would they?

Now to Range. The Cult of the Head Start began long before we clocked it…

In 1969, a little girl was born to Laszlo and Karla Polgar of Hungary. Both school teachers who had come together over their frustration at a school system that was “one-size-fits-all,” the Polgars planned an “experiment,” during which they would nurture all the children they might have to brilliance.

The field of genius Laszlo picked was chess (because he felt progress would be easier to document). Soon, the Polgars added two more little girls, and fought the Hungarian police over the right to homeschool all three daughters. They won, and so the girls would have trainers for table tennis at 7am, breakfast at 10, and then chess the rest of the day. Once they (quickly) surpassed their parents’ expertise in the field, specialised trainers were hired.

The eldest of the girls, Susan, became the first woman to achieve Grandmaster status at the age of 21. Second daughter Sofia peaked one rank below at International Master, and the youngest, Judit, made Youngest Grandmaster Ever, aged 15 years and 5 months.

Dad Laszlo considered the “experiment” a success, suggesting that if his early specialization approach were applied to thousands more children, humanity had a real shot at curing cancer and AIDS. Hold. That. Thought..

Are You Tiger’s Parent… Or Roger’s? 

Golf superstar Tiger Woods has come to epitomise the High Achiever Born Of Deliberate Practice, the face that (proverbially) launched a thousand Early-Development-Of-Your-Child’s-Expertise parenting manuals (including one written by his own dad Earl). Earl Woods recognised the difference in his son from the early age of 6 months, and by the ripe old age of 2 years when other parents of toddlers were looking out for developmental milestones like kicking a ball or standing on tiptoe, teeny Tiger was driving a ball past the impressed faces of celebrity talk show hosts and tv commentators with a professional putter sized down to toddler height.

Tennis great Roger Federer is the pole opposite. His mum might’ve been a tennis coach, but not only did she never coach him, she was known to wander off for a chat while he played in tournaments. “He would just upset me anyway… He… tried out every strange stroke…. That is just no fun for a mother.” Daddy Federer was a huge stickler for just the one rule: Don’t Cheat. Unlike Tiger, Roger played soccer, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis… and badminton over his neighbour’s fence. He’s also a pretty keen skateboarder.

I do believe if Mum Federer instead got really stressy, it might have limited young Federer’s learning depth and breadth. If Dad hadn’t enforced No Cheats, Son might not have worked at it hard enough to develop sufficient skill. Not… to be confused with legitimate shortcuts – “cheating” is a big no-no of mine, born of OCD. (Y’know, in case you thought it was about self-righteousness 😀 ) No it’s not. It’s OCD . As in, it costs too much to do. It’s a big freaking hidden cost.

Why? Because striving to chalk a “fake win” places the emphasis on the win instead of on the skill improvement. For kids, this is lethal, it will kill their ability to develop. If they are too afraid to fail, to fall, they don’t try enough. There is no other way to improve except to fail and to fall. Epstein talks about how a toddler learning to walk never cares that he/she falls. We care more and more about this as we grow up.

The other big risk is this kind of cheating sneakily  instils insecurity – you think you CAN’T win except by cheating.. 

According to author David Epstein, there are many more high achievers who do it the Roger Way than who do it the Tiger Way – we just read wayyy more about the (relatively fewer) Tigers out there. Remember how much people freaked out about Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Epstein mentions her too – including her own observation in hindsight that second daughter Lulu dropped the violin despite showing enormous potential in it because the field was picked by her mother, not her.

Range is a book valuing the generalist over the lifelong specialist in the fields of professional sports, art or scientific research. Epstein, whose first child was born just months before the book’s publication, blames parents puts it,” Before this was even a book idea, I was interested in (early childhood) specialisation, and you cannot interact with that area without parents being front and center.” Oh Yay, Yet Another Book Counterintuitive To Contemporary Parenting Wisdoms.

**Jake Andraka, 15 year old who made testing for pancreatic cancer simpler by (roughly) patiently testing pancreatic cancer markers found in bodily fluids until he came to one which could reliably react to chemicals they could package on a piece of paper, not unlike in a standard pregnancy test where the second line on the test appears if your bodily fluid carries a certain hormone only present if you are pregnant.

The real need Andraka is filling however is the much less invasive way testing was made possible by his initially fledgling science project meant for a science competition – because getting people to go for scary invasive expensive testing early is a real hurdle. He may not come up with a “miraculous cure” for cancer of the sort Laszlo’s chess experiments hoped to achieve via extensive deliberate practice, but early detection saves many more lives, with existing cures. If testing is made as painless and cheap as buying a drugstore kit, many more people will do it. If you are dying of boredom at your part time Mannings sales asst job to pay for night classes or whatever, think this: You get paid to be in the store for hours and have a think what else could save a few more lives, makes this world just a little better. Rocket Science Phd Not Required, lookit what the 15 year old decided to do. We can all make careful exploration of the tasks we are given and do the creative best with the hand we are dealt. 

Energy you spend on a self-gratifying cheap shot to artificially make yourself feel better about yourself is energy you did not spend on something more positive – a first step, a thought, an idea – that could someday save another person, make someone else’s day a little better.. (You have the power to plant a seed, lift someone else up, make someone’s day – how could you ever have enough of feeling that good? 🙂 If you saw each seed in an apple as the potential orchard invisible, how could you ever say to yourself, “Nope, today I choose instead to be a downer to someone. Now, how many more life-saving, spirits-uplifting mindsets can I kill?”?)

Another inspired inventor I like to regularly go back to is Norman Borlaug. Presented with a fixed amount of land that grows a relatively fixed amount of crop, he changed the crop. He solved a terrible famine by breeding a new species of wheat – a strain that was disease resistant, with shorter stalks to bear heavier yield, so that more food could be produced in the same plot of land with the same number of plant crops.

Borlaug, a diversified athlete who eventually specialised in wrestling, credits sports as instilling the drive he needed to keep at the many permutations to develop Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62, the two early successful wheat breeds. (On the Ted blog, Jake Andraka says he tested some 4,000 proteins before coming up with the one that would facilitate manufacturing a drugstore cancer test.)

(Above: Borlaug on his school wrestling team and later in life coaching baseball. Pics from frogstorm.com and off the U of Minnesota website)

Borlaug Hypothesis, applied in the field of agriculture whereby an increase in productivity reduces the need for deforestation, is a personal inspiration: I keep thinking if you can increase the productivity and effectiveness of what you have been blessed with in this life, there are so many more increased positive outcomes (better relationships, you can be a better friend and team mate, etc etc) and a correspondingly decreased number of negative ones. Next time you watch a funny-yet-horrible Youtube about a potential Mexican Wall, think: Borlaug’s wheat transformed parts of Mexico from acute hunger in the 50s to becoming a net exporter of wheat in the 60s. A decade, not a lifetime. They had enough extra to sell. To feed their economy.

What if Borlaug hadn’t had the opportunity to dabble in plants and grasshoppers as a kid? (He grew up in a rural farming area.) What if he didn’t also get enough opportunity to play a lotta different sports?

In a city, we don’t normally think about plants getting sick, (in our case if we kill a house plant we go buy a new one from the shop 😀 ). But the same factors look very different to a farming community who relies on a crop for food and trade. Thing is, where d’you think all the neatly packed veggies, dairy, eggs and what-not began, before ending up in your city supermarket?

When crop sickens and the epidemic goes through entire acres of plants, they have to burn it down and start all over again. If land you naturally live on is bountiful, you have an economy. “Free food,” something to trade with. If the land will grow nothing (and let’s expand that metaphorically as well), what will a people do?

What do people living in the bountiful land do? Build a wall? If people are motivated enough (sadly, desperate), no wall keeps people out. Or they would die trying. If you helped your neighbour’s economy, you wouldn’t need the wall. Maybe someday they have something useful for you, too.

Among the many awards Borlaug received was the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Peace. Prize. I mean sure, he deserves many accolades, among them is that he “saved a billion lives,” but did it occur to anyone else as interesting that esteemed Nobel Laureates would describe his achievement as “a contribution to world peace through increasing food supply”? 

In interviews, David Epstein mentions that he was particularly interested in the parenting style of the aforementioned Jake Andraka’s parents and how they had supported their son’s learning, observing they were “active enablers” – whenever their son displayed interest in a certain area, they simply went out and got all the materials to encourage his experimenting. What they did press him on however was to engage more with whatever was pique-ing his curiosity.

(They did however have to enforce a strict “Science downstairs only” rule because Jake and older brother Luke (himself an MIT THINK award recipient) burned out the microwave, gave a cousin E.Coli infection, had pet ferrets running around freely and constantly took delivery of various esoteric chemicals in the mail to feed their experiments. Jake wrote to 200 labs (he was rejected by 199) because when it got more intense he “couldn’t do cancer research on the kitchen countertop… my mum doesn’t like that.” But sure, he started out at home and they had to replace the microwave. No, I don’t particularly want to volunteer my microwave to be trashed either :D)

Anyway, back to Range. In his search to figure out what kind of dad he was going to be when his own baby is born (seriously. It comes up in his interviews), Epstein identifies two main areas where Head Starts are supposed to matter in particular: sports… and music. (His best seller prior to Range is The Sports Gene, about how while advances in technology have certainly assisted athletes in their training, high achieving athletes have come to stick to the sports their body types facilitate – for eg 7-ft tall people aren’t common in the population but they are common in the NBA.)

As for music, Epstein observes that Shinichi Suzuki of the famed Suzuki Method of music instruction did not attempt to play an instrument til he was 17. Suzuki did however have access to violins – because his dad had a violin factory – when Suzuki and his siblings fought, they would hit each other with violins. He attempted to play for the first time aged 17, trying to mimic recordings he heard, by ear. Which is why his methods are so powerful for young children developing an ear. (Am I the only one who finds this funny – famed technique of music instruction for Early Learners developed by Late Starter 😀 )

Here’s more funny stuff to end on: Today we all accept that the gravitational pull of our sun affects the orbit of the planets in our solar system, affects the speed at which they move. But did you know that before people knew that, German astronomer Johannes Kepler considered the possibility more distant planets had “weaker moving souls”? As he then approached the truth about gravity, he was resoundingly mocked by Galileo, for the “ridiculous notion” that the moon “had dominion over the waters.”

Galileo himself wanted to be a mathematician when he grew up, much to his musician dad’s disapproval – dad wanted him to be a doctor (so it’s not just the Asians 😀 )  Young G got “bored” studying Medicine, instead favouring Geometry – in church one day he caught himself watching the hanging candle chandeliers as they were pulled aside to be lighted, timing the swings against his own heartbeat, thereby coming up with the mathematical law of pendulum. My point is this – when was it ever decided that learning technical or mathematical stuff would be… excruciating? Part of music is mathematical – G Senior made groundbreaking discoveries in music theory, it wasn’t that much of a long shot that young G became a university Maths Chair at the ripe old age of 25 (But how hilarious is it, that Galileo Galilei’s dad thought his son was a “disappointment”?)

Because, “when they try out every funny stroke and shot… it’s just not fun for a mother. Or father.” Oh the “joys” of parenting… 🙂

Epilogue:

At my father’s wake, a particular flower arrangement arrived. I recognised the names on the card from having heard them in background conversations during my childhood, when my dad was home (he otherwise travelled often, into remote agricultural areas, in order to observe crops in their natural environments, test the soil, mix minerals, do grafting…) – because they had once worked with him on plantations out of Sandakan, Sabah….. 3 decades ago. Fondly remembered, loved, respected.