True grit: is perseverance overrated?

Well-rounded individuals may be more primed
to succeed a chaotic and fast-paced world

In Depth

However, in Range, Epstein “makes a compelling
case for actively cultivating inefficiency” and the advantages of
dilettantism over dedication, even contending that “frequent
quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers”.

Is dabbling underrated?

“Folk wisdom holds the trade-off between breadth and
depth to be a cruel one: ‘jack-of-all-trades, master of none,’ and
so forth,” writes Jim Holt in the New York Times’s review of Range. But the
reality is far more complex.

Epstein argues that trial and error is a vital
part of learning, and that trying our hands at a variety of skills,
hobbies and even careers helps us develop the flexibility,
self-knowledge and creativity and innovation to thrive in an
increasingly complex and unpredictable world.

For instance, his research found that Nobel
prize-winning scientists are 22 times more likely than the average
scientists to have artistic interests outside their
field.

While specialists “are very good at advancing
knowledge in the paradigm that they’re familiar with”, writes
Martin Rezny in Medium, “you need a generalist to come up with
an entirely new way of solving a particular problem, or to notice
an entirely new problem”.

He cites the example of Apple founder Steve
Jobs, who had a wide array of interests in non-STEM subjects, from
Buddhism to calligraphy. 

“Much of what I stumbled into by following my
curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on,”
Jobs told college students in
2005. 

For instance, “if I had never dropped in on that
single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had
multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts”. 

So should we be discouraging
specialisation?

The reality is that some people simply aren’t
cut out to be generalists – and that’s okay. In Range,
Epstein argues that specialists have their place in disciplines
like chess, golf or classical music, “where patterns recur and
feedback is quick and accurate”, says the New York
Times.

The argument made by proponents of generalism is
not that no-one should pursue a specialism, but that we should not
be beholden to an unhelpful cultural paradigm which prizes
dedication and disdains dabbling.

“We’ve become so focused on specialisation,” Carter
Phipps, author of the book Evolutionaries, tells Forbes. 

“But just as there are truths that can only be
found as a specialist… there are truths that can only be revealed
by a generalist who can weave these ideas in the broader fabric of
understanding.”