Range - David Epstein Page 0,3

took four years off boxing as a kid to learn traditional Ukrainian dance, reflected, “I was doing so many different sports as a young boy—gymnastics, basketball, football, tennis—and I think, ultimately, everything came together with all those different kinds of sports to enhance my footwork.”

Prominent sports scientist Ross Tucker summed up research in the field simply: “We know that early sampling is key, as is diversity.”

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In 2014, I included some of the findings about late specialization in sports in the afterword of my first book, The Sports Gene. The following year, I got an invitation to talk about that research from an unlikely audience—not athletes or coaches, but military veterans. In preparation, I perused scientific journals for work on specialization and career-swerving outside of the sports world. I was struck by what I found. 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. I found a raft of studies that 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. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators.

I also began to realize that some of the people whose work I deeply admired from afar—from Duke Ellington (who shunned music lessons to focus on drawing and baseball as a kid) to Maryam Mirzakhani (who dreamed of becoming a novelist and instead became the first woman to win math’s most famous prize, the Fields Medal)—seemed to have more Roger than Tiger in their development stories. I delved further and encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their range of experiences and interests, but because of it: a CEO who took her first job around the time her peers were getting ready to retire; an artist who cycled through five careers before he discovered his vocation and changed the world; an inventor who stuck to a self-made antispecialization philosophy and turned a small company founded in the nineteenth century into one of the most widely resonant names in the world today.

I had only dipped my toe into research on specialization in the wider world of work, so in my talk to the small group of military veterans I mostly stuck to sports. I touched on the other findings only briefly, but the audience seized on it. All were late specializers or career changers, and as they filed up one after another to introduce themselves after the talk, I could tell that all were at least moderately concerned, and some were borderline ashamed of it.

They had been brought together by the Pat Tillman Foundation, which, in the spirit of the late NFL player who left a professional football career to become an Army Ranger, provides scholarships to veterans, active-duty military, and military spouses who are undergoing career changes or going back to school. They were all scholarship recipients, former paratroopers and translators who were becoming teachers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They brimmed with enthusiasm, but rippled with an undercurrent of fear. Their LinkedIn profiles didn’t show the linear progression toward a particular career they had been told employers wanted. They were anxious starting grad school alongside younger (sometimes much younger) students, or changing lanes later than their peers, all because they had been busy accumulating inimitable life and leadership experiences. Somehow, a unique advantage had morphed in their heads into a liability.

A few days after I spoke to the Tillman Foundation group, a former Navy SEAL who came up after the talk emailed me: “We are all transitioning from one career to another. Several of us got together after you had left and discussed how relieved we were to have heard you speak.” I was slightly bemused to find that a former Navy SEAL with an undergraduate degree in history and geophysics pursuing graduate degrees in business and public administration from Dartmouth and Harvard needed me to affirm his life choices. But like the others in the room, he had been told, both implicitly and explicitly, that changing directions was dangerous.

The talk was greeted with so much enthusiasm that the foundation invited me to give a keynote speech at the annual conference in 2016, and then to small group gatherings in different cities. Before each occasion, I read more