Hello friends!
Quick trivia to get started as usual:
The idea of today’s post came to me watching this ted talk video. In the talk the presenter starts by something that I have always dealt with: what if you do not have a good answer to the classic question “what do you want to do when you grow up?” that every kid gets.
I have always struggled with this and I have always been very jealous of the kids that have always had a calling “I want to be a fireman” or “I want to be a hairdresser”. In my life I have never actually felt like I had a clear vision of what I wanted to be professionally, and to be honest at my not-anymore-young age I still do not have a clue. I used to live this as a problem and something that I either would figure out along the way or accept to live with. I therefore have a lot of thoughts that sparkled from this video and from a great book that I read a few years ago called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World which completely changed my perspective on this topic.
Multipotential? Range?
The author of the Ted talks tells in the video the story of her life and how as a kid and a young adult she realized that she had a pattern of becoming very curious about an area (say painting, or marine biology), invest a lot of time learning and studying in that area and then… eventually get bored of the topic, and slowly losing interest. Until a new completely different area would come up and the cycle would start again. After this happened a few times in her life she started thinking about it and instead of thinking about it as a lack of grit, or a gap in going till the end on something, she defined this trait as the key feature of a “multipotentialite”.
She defines multipotentialite as “a person who has many different interests and creative pursuits in life. Multipotentialites have no “one true calling” the way specialists do. Multipotentialites thrive on learning, exploring, and mastering new skills. We are excellent at bringing disparate ideas together in creative ways. This makes us incredible innovators and problem solvers. When it comes to new interests that emerge, our insatiable curiosity leads us to absorb everything we can get our hands on. As a result, we pick up new skills fast and tend to be a wealth of information”. She even has a quiz to find out whether you’re a multipotentialite.
I don’t know if this is the first time you hear the term but this is something that has been quite popular online, this concept of multipotential has also been mythologized by Elon Musk’s numerous successful parallel pursuits (he’s currently the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Starlink, Neurolink, etc). I admit that I have never been a fan of the definition because I have sometimes heard it used by people that leveraged their “multipotentiality” to explain their mediocrity in many areas. I could say about myself that I am a “multipotential-sportman” but truth is that I mediocre in many sports (tennis, football, squash. padel, running, etc) not really a star in all.
I was therefore extremely happy to read “Range”, and I believe that the book uses a term that I like more to express roughly the same concept. I would therefore stick to Range to define this concept of not being narrowly specialized, but having experience in many lateral fields that are not necessarily linked.
Education and the push to specialization
I have personally grown up in a professional environment where being a generalist was considered a sign of mediocrity. To move up in the corporate chain, especially as I started my career as an advisor you were constantly told to “pick an industry and specialize”. And this is frankly also the mantra that a lot of tech companies have brought in the professional world, the concept of the superiority of engineers and “builders” vs the generic “manager” is sometimes a misunderstanding of this concept in my opinion.
Reflecting on the origin of this issue, the book has an excellent point: a lot of this “relevance of specialization”, or in other words having a clear answer to the question “what do you want to do when you grow up”, starts from our education system and the narrative around success we foster.
“Our education system awards specialization over critical thinking: the traits that earn good grades at the university do not include critical ability of any broad significance. This must change, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.”
I fully believe in this, and in my experience the ability to think, find patterns in complexity, rationalize and put structure on complicated problems is a core skill that can be applied to a lot of different fields and in my opinion one of the key trait of the people I have seen and define as my professional inspiration. The author in the book divides his analysis of range in 3 parts.
1. Testing and learning is more important than specializing early on
The book starts with the story of Tiger Woods, who famously started playing golf at age 4 and proceeded to become one of the greatest players in the history of sports. This story is something we have all heard often, and it is also the thesis of a great book (Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell) that I enjoyed and plan to write more on: you need a lot of hours on a singular topic to excel, so starting early gives you a competitive advantage. This concept, the author argues, is however very attractive to tell (and that’s probably why we hear so many stories like this) because “it is a tidy prescription, low on uncertainty and high on efficiency”. It sounds like the secret recipe for success that a lot of people are looking for, a manual to become the greatest in a field.
“Told in retrospect for popular media, stories of innovation and self-discovery can look like orderly journeys from A to B. Sort of like how inspirational-snippet accounts of the journeys of elite athletes appear straightforward, but the stories usually get murkier when examined in depth or over time.”
However in Range the author provides a lot of evidence (using the life of Van Gogh or the Nobel prize Andre Geim) to argue that, while less sexy, the most common path of successful people in many fields (business, art, science) is non-linear, it has a lot of detours, “dead-ends” and changes of direction. In other words a lot of non linear progress, but also a lot of failure!
And when diving deeper in the story the author found out that in reality “Tiger woods as a child, dabbled in many other sports including skiing, basketball, tennis, skateboarding, and badminton. He believes trying this diverse collection of sports helped him develop the impressive hand-eye coordination and athleticism he has today. He didn’t focus on tennis until he was a teenager, showing us it’s okay to try things out until you find what you like. “
2. Having a wide range of experience will increase your chances of success
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
This is the part that actually stuck with me more of the entire book. I have always had this instinct in my career to “keep open as many options as possible” when I was choosing a professional path. That is why when starting to work I loved being a consultant, it allowed me to see many things in parallel. I did not have a defined strategy to do this (I had absolutely no clue of what I was doing to be honest) but I think I was more driven by what I call instinct or better my set of “cultural values”. I used to live that as a problem, because I saw most people around me taking more narrow and ringfenced career progress decisions, and I felt that they were going to be masters at something while I risked being half-good at many things.
However the author argues that having a lot of experiences in many domains, creates a foundation of experience that is key to success in many fields. “Winners”— meaning individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
This reminded me of this viral video I saw on twitter, where the author argues there’s a linear relation between f**ing around and finding out:
I believe we all have experienced this when tackling complicated problems, especially when dealing with more creative endeavors: Creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the more work eminent creators produced, the more duds they churned out, and the higher their chances of a supernova success. Thomas Edison held more than a thousand patents, most completely unimportant, and was rejected for many more. His failures were legion, but his successes—the mass-market light bulb, the phonograph, a precursor to the film projector—were earthshaking.
The interesting lesson that the book sums this point in is that you should never feel behind. “Two Roman historians recorded that when Julius Caesar was a young man he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain and broke down in tears. “Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable,” he supposedly said.”
We should approach our personal voyage willing to learn and adjust as you go. And actually being ready to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.
3. Fooled by expertise
The final point the book makes is a very interesting reflection on the value of forecasting by experts. We all naturally look at deep field experts to ask for advice, but actually the data tells that often experts get trapped in an over-confidence from their knowledge which ultimately clouds their ability to forecast. Because of their narrow focus, they tend to have explicit theories about how things work, which leads them to cherry-pick evidence to support their existing beliefs. This is also known as confirmation bias and it is one of the biggest hurdles a thinker needs to face. If you want a reliable forecaster, look to someone willing to question their own beliefs.
Tetlock decided to put expert predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he began a study to collect short- and long-term forecasts from 284 highly educated experts (most had doctorates) who averaged more than twelve years of experience in their specialties. The questions covered international politics and economics, and in order to make sure the predictions were concrete, the experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions over enough time that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted twenty years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future. The results limned a very wicked world. The average expert was a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, academic degrees, and even (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that some future event was impossible or nearly impossible, it nonetheless occurred 15 percent of the time. When they declared a sure thing, it failed to transpire more than one-quarter of the time. The Danish proverb that warns “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,” was right. Dilettantes who were pitted against the experts were no more clairvoyant, but at least they were less likely to call future events either impossible or sure things, leaving them with fewer laugh-out-loud errors to atone for—if, that was, the experts had believed in atonement.
The most relevant thing here is that besides the error in forecasting, which by its nature is hard, experts have issues in admitting systematic flaws in their judgment, even in the face of their results. When they succeed, it is completely on their own merits—their expertise clearly enabled them to figure out the world. When they miss wildly, it is always a near miss; they had certainly understood the situation, they insisted, and if just one little thing had gone differently, they would have nailed it. Or their understanding was correct; the timeline was just a bit off. Victories were total victories, and defeats were always just a touch of bad luck away from having been victories too.
Playing devil’s advocate
I admit that I have a perspective bias here, as I work in a field where arguably deep specialization is not the core skill. There is actually a lot of discussion, especially in the Silicon-Valley culture professional world, about the dictatorship of managers. Or despise toward the “surplus elite” of managers who really add zero value, and benefit greatly from the work of engineers, scientists and builders in general. Managers that often change industry from finance to biotechnology, and believe they have a grasp at everything. Managers of these elites are often depicted similarly to how the bureaucrat of the early 1900s were: adding zero value and creating a lot of friction for innovation and progress.
I do not disagree with this narrative to be honest. While the “product-first” culture we live in is probably exaggerating the value of builders, I believe firmly that we need a lot of builders, scientists and engineers who create a better world.
My main point is not that being a generalist is superior to being a specialist. That is actually why I do not like the word multipotentialite, it sounds like a super hero and it implies everyone else is inferior somehow. I do believe however that these are two traits that have equal value and role in society, we need both generalists and specialists. And as the Ted Talk author says “Some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together. The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project. It's a beautiful partnership. But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired. And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers.”
I believe that while being a generalist has always proven to be a very important trait, it is going to be even more so in the world dominated by AI. As technology and AI develops, machines will constantly improve their ability to perform better than humans in specialized tasks, and the value of humans will actually be more and more in having broad perspective, understanding the context, consider lateral approaches and developing critical thinking.
Having Range will be more important than ever! Or am I just justifying my total lack of skills as a tennis player pretending I am a multipotentialite????
Have a fantastic weekend
WHAT I LIKED THIS WEEK
Last weekend I bumped randomly into a great book called What I talk about when I talk about running by the Japanese writer Murakami. I absolutely loved it! It’s a must read if you’re a runner, but also a very fun (and short) reflection of a brilliant writer about the importance of perseverance and grit.
I have seen the first 3 episodes of the Netflix series about the Tennis ATP circuit Break Point. Netflix is interestingly exploiting this model of sport-dedicated series (riding the success of the F1 Drive to Survive) and I admit they are nailing it. I really liked the first episodes, and the first one is on my circuit favorite player Nick Kyrgios!
My super talented reporter friend Fringus released a super interesting reportage he has done on the intensive farming of salmons in the pristine fyords of Patagonia and Chile. This is super interesting, apparently the food industry introduced salmons in south America to exploit a lower cost of the food fish is fed, with a huge environmental cost. Francesco told me about this when we met over Christmas and he opened a world of issues I had no idea existed. Go watch it!
Writing time: 55’ - reading time: 14’ - Trivia result: 3 (if you pick 2 you can have 1 red/1 white, or two of the same color. If you pick a third one by definition you will have a pair).
i totally relate