Have we been pushing our knowledge into increasingly deeper silos?

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. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard.

As we grow older and come upon a time when we must select a career, we are being encouraged to pursue a path towards depth: the deeper into the field we delve into, the more value we can bring onto the table.

Is that necessarily true?

This essay are notes on this particular topic covered in the book Range.

The perception of needing to specialise

As the amount of knowledge in the world expands, each domain has become too large for a single person to master.

The prevailing myth is we must specialise to succeed. With such a mindset, we are encouraged to pigeonhole ourselves into domains in increasing depth. Such a notion limits our freedom of movement across industries, and our effectiveness at integrating fields to generate new knowledge.

The ideal is that with repeated exposure, we attain mastery, from the advanced knowledge of our field, and the endless repetitions of the tasks we perform.

Specialisation =? Mastery

The implicit assumption is that practice makes perfect.

The examples where specialisation lead to mastery are famous. Golf, chess, tennis and music are classical examples where young prodigies developed from an early age dominates their field. These role models inspire families to pin their hopes on cultivating the next Tiger Woods or Mozart. In some others, it may not be so clear. A meta-analysis (link here) shows "the effect of deliberate practice was strong for games (26%), music (21%), and sports (18%), and much weaker for education (4%) and professions (< 1% and not statistically significant)"

What are the differences between these domains? How do I know practice makes perfect in the field I have committed myself to?

This has to do with the learning environments these domains are in. There are kind and unkind learning environments. In the former, learning is predictable and stable. Environments are unchanging, so we can apply by rote memory what is learnt. In the latter, the environment and conditions shifts. Repetition and feedback may not lead to improvement. Our reliance on patterns may mislead us in environments with not-so-similar conditions.

How does being a generalist lead to mastery of your domain

Let us go all the way back to start, when we were still in school. How could we have changed things then?

Students are equipped with an increasing amount of knowledge, but necessarily not the ways of thinking to apply them. The typical student also suffer from a lack of explicit teaching on how do we learn. Following are some points:

Learning is most effective when it is effortful, when it requires high amounts of cognitive labour on the part of the student. Learning made too easy may not be retained by the student.

Even though we think the problem can be conquered by showing more determination, grit may not be the only answer. Sometimes, students and workers can benefit from switching to a career of good fit. A possible value of education in increasing productivity is allowing students to sample and experiment more, so that there is more time to find a career of good fit.

Interleaving is highly useful, in training students to identify the right problem. As more specialised domains evolve from the sheer volume and depth of our knowledge, it becames impossible to solve every problem ourselves. The most important thing is to figure out what problem it is.

Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem. That happens to be a hallmark of expert problem solving. Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.

The one who may end up providing the best solution could be an outsider to a domain, because their thinking is not limited by the conventional mindsets within the domain.

So what?

How can we cultivate sufficient knowledge to become a T-shaped individual, where we have a working knowledge of a diverse number of fields, and a deep expertise in a few chosen ones? How can we develop range?

• Continually stay open-minded for opportunities and experiments. There may not be value in setting long-term goals, as we may not have sufficient information to make a choice.
• Learn how to work in rotating teams, who can generate the most diverse perspectives in exploring.
• Having a regular schedule to work on our own side projects, that take into somewhere new.

Call to Action

Set aside a 30 minute slot on your calendar and label it Experiments. Use the time to explore something that is not yet part of your work or daily life.