Education Bookcast

Range is a book that I saw in a bookshop and called out to me like little else can. Subtitled "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World", I felt as though it were written for me personally. It seems as though the way to "get ahead" is to specialise early and specialise hard, drilling deeply into a single topic until you become a world expert. Get your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in before the competition gets there first. And yet I find myself always moving from topic to topic, weaving a wider web of apparently unrelated experience and knowledge. This very podcast is a testament to that. Could I be wasting my time? David Epstein says no. As the author of the bestselling book The Sports Gene, he is no stranger to criticising the prevailing view, based originally on the work of K. Anders Ericsson (and subsequently reinterpreted, or distorted, by journalist Malcolm Gladwell), about the primacy of deliberate practice within a single domain. In Range, he shows that there is another, more common path