In Range, David Epstein set out a compelling case for favouring breadth over depth in our careers. He points out that when we learn things in a variety of contexts, we understand them better so can apply them creatively to novel situations. Epstein further explains that a sampling period, during which you try a variety of different things, can increase your match quality (how well you fit what you do), leading to higher incomes and greater life satisfaction in the long run.
Buy Range at: Amazon | Kobo (affiliate links)
Overall, I enjoyed Range and found Epstein’s arguments to be persuasive. However, one issue that the book did not address is a possible difference between whether range is necessarily better at an individual level, even if it’s better for society as a whole.
The higher returns from pursuing range may be due to higher risk
In the book, Epstein referred to several studies suggesting that, in the long run, pursuing range will lead to things like higher average earnings, more academic citations or more patents. What I’d be interested in seeing is the distribution of outcomes for range vs early specialisation. I suspect range results in greater variation, which means it’s riskier. Intuitively, this seems likely. Further, as Epstein showed, range can lead to some incredible outliers, which are likely to bring up the average.
But, as an individual, you might be more interested in the probable outcome (i.e. the statistical mode) than the average outcome (the statistical mean). You may well opt for the “sure bet” over a chance at a big win.
Many studies have shown that, financially speaking, people tend to be risk averse. I think this is perfectly rational. Money tends to be positively correlated with happiness (or, more precisely, “emotional well-being”), but only up to a point. Winning $50m will not make you fifty times happier than winning $1m. And, since you only have one life, you may reasonably prefer to mitigate your downside risk over maximising your expected “return”. Personally, I’ve always cared more about “not being poor” than about “being rich”.
If it’s true that range leads to more variable returns than specialisation, and most people are risk averse, you’d expect to see higher average returns from pursuing range. Yet, on an individual level, it may still be rational to take the safer option, the well-trodden career path — it just depends on your risk appetite.
But range may create positive externalities
Society as a whole benefits when outliers make new discoveries. But new discoveries be less likely when people go for safe, specialised, jobs. (Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang made a very similar argument in Smart People Should Build Things.)
For example, Epstein suggests that range played a key role in Johannes Kepler’s invention of astrophysics and to Claude Shannon founding the field of information theory. We all benefited from Kepler and Shannon’s discoveries. The value that they created persisted for generations, far outweighing whatever benefits ended up accruing to them.
If it’s true that there are positive externalities to pursuing range, that would explain why there seems to be “too much” specialisation currently, and Epstein’s promotion of range would generally be good for society.
Conclusion
Epstein has not persuaded me that, on an individual level, it necessarily makes sense to go for range over specialisation. Going for range is more likely to make sense if:
- You’re comfortable with risk. When others are taking secure and established paths of specialisation, there could be a significant premium to pursuing range.
- You’re altruistic. If you care more about what’s best for society, then range may increase the chances that you make some innovative breakthrough or discovery, benefiting the rest of us.
- You just like it. For many people, I expect this will be the decisive factor. If you can’t stand the thought of doing the same thing for the next 40 years, then pursuing range may make sense even if it’s riskier. So I suggest the main takeaway from Epstein’s book is not so much that “you should go for range”. Rather it’s “don’t worry if you naturally have wide-ranging interests or change careers later in life”.
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If you haven’t already, you should check out my full summary for Range.
6 thoughts on “Range at an individual level vs a societal level”
Can you expand upon your suspicion that range results in greater variation? I don’t share that same intuition
Great question. I think there’s a couple of things driving that suspicion:
(1) If you do things not knowing where they will lead (i.e. going for range), then most likely some of them will turn out to be useful but many will not. However, when they turn out to be useful, they could be VERY useful because neither you nor others could’ve predicted at the outset where those things would lead, so you’ll be in a unique position.
Whereas if you only do things knowing that they’ll advance you along a particular career path (i.e. going for specialisation), it’s more likely those things will all turn out *somewhat* useful, but others are likely to have done those things too, so you won’t be in such a unique position to capitalise on them.
(2) To the extent that going for range means trying out different careers, that’s inherently risky in that you’ll give up any career capital you’ve built up in your first career when you move to your second one. There are other ways of going for range that don’t involve changing careers, but trying different careers was certainly part of what Epstein talked about when discussing the Dark Horse Project, Frances Hesselbein, etc. (Incidentally, this is what reminded me to come back to this draft post, because I’d’ just finished Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, which talks about the value of building up career capital.)
(3) In financial markets, there’s a correlation between risk and reward (higher risk leads to returns that are higher on average, but more volatile). This is because most investors are risk averse so will demand a risk premium to compensate for additional risk. Now, obviously labour markets are not quite the same as financial markets. But at a high level, I would expect the same risk/reward correlation because I think people would still be risk averse on average (arguably even moreso, since people can’t diversify as well with their careers).
Put another way, if being a generalist led to returns that were both higher AND less risky than being a specialist, why would anyone want to be a specialist? Maybe if you thought there was some other reason people were systematically biased towards specialised career paths (e.g. specialisation is more enjoyable, or people mistakenly think specialisation is less risky than it actually is). These are possible, but they don’t strike me as all that likely.
(4) Anecdotally, I see greater variation in career outcomes for my friends that opted for range over a safer, specialised career path. This is very weak, especially as most of my friends studied law, which is not very representative of the wider economy, and there’s probably a selection effect at play. But I mention it here because I think it did influence my suspicion.
My answer is a bit longwinded but there were multiple things all leading me to that assumption, though I hadn’t thought them through until you asked. Hope my explanation makes sense and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the issue, too
I really appreciate this response. Your explanations do make sense, and I think I largely share the same anecdotal experience, yet I still feel that the opposite may be the case.
In my mind, learning a wide variety of skills, rather than specializing in one particular subset, insulates you from catastrophic risk. It’s floor-raising and risk mitigation, akin to diversifying one’s investment portfolio.
And in that sense, specialization may actually be higher risk, higher reward. Yes, specializing allows you to take advantage of the extra value of building career capital, which increases the ceiling. But what if some radical shift drastically reduces the value of career capital in your domain? You’d have no backup to fall upon.
Again, I’d need more time for this to marinate, since I also intuitively believe that there are “safe bet” career paths like becoming a doctor/lawyer/engineer. But then again, that could just be my biases and a lack of intuitive understanding of tail risk (which would speak to the second paragraph in your third point). I’ve also been spending a lot of time reading Nassim Taleb’s Incerto series, and so these thoughts are likely influenced by his perspective on risk management.
Anyways, does this resonate with you at all?
Yes, your response does resonate – I had some similar thoughts after first reading your question, but I’m not completely sold on it. Let me offer a counterpoint by using an example.
Assume Sally the specialist spends 5 years focused on one skill, and Gary the generalist spends 5 years developing 5 skills (1 year per skill). After 5 years, assuming that Gary hasn’t been able to combine his skills in useful ways (more on this below), Sally likely has a significantly higher income by focusing on the one skill.
Next, assume a radical shift happens to eradicate the one skill Sally has. Sally now has no useful skills. Gary still does. However, Gary’s only spent 1 year developing that skill, so it should only take Sally 1 year to get up to where Gary is.
It would look like more of a setback for Sally if you measure relative to where she was before her skill was eradicated. Going from 5 years’ experience to no experience is a big setback, whereas Gary hasn’t suffered any setback at all. Yet if you measure relative to where they both *started*, Sally would likely still be better off financially. She’d only be one year behind Gary in work experience, but her total lifetime earnings would be higher, and she could have saved and invested some of those earnings. (Psychologically, however, Sally will probably be worse off.)
However, if Gary found some innovative way to combine his skills, he could catapult way past Sally. In this case, Gary’s earnings could exceed Sally’s even if she *didn’t* lose her job. Epstein’s examples suggest this may be more common than we think. But I don’t think it’s a *guarantee* Gary will find a way to do this, hence why I think his path is higher risk, higher reward.
Obviously this is a highly stylised example but hopefully that sort of shows where I’m coming from. I also note that, in real life, radical shifts aren’t that common (almost by definition), and many specialised skills are somewhat transferable, so specialisation is probably less risky than the example suggests, as it assumes a worst case scenario for Sally.
For the record, I’m using “risk” to mean variation/uncertainty, which includes uncertain upsides as well as downsides. I haven’t read Taleb’s work, but from what I gather I think he focuses more on mitigating downside risk? So just checking that we mean the same thing when we use the term “risk”.
My first thought was also like Zak’s – isn’t the bigger risk to specialise?
I think the answer is that it’s just probably more nuanced. I thought the bigger risk was to specialise because I read a lot of the stuff that Daniel Vassallo puts out: https://twitter.com/dvassallo
But he is writing from the perspective of someone who is starting a business/operating independently. He makes the point that society benefits when founders go off and spend 2 years (or more) specialising in a niche trying to come up with billion dollar businesses. But his point is that for you, the individual, this is a terrible risk/reward tradeoff because most of the time you will fail, which can be financially and psychologically devastating, and once you have a few million dollars, who cares about the additional upside.
I think that when framed in terms of employment, the risk/reward tradeoff is quite different from Daniel Vassallo’s concern though. There’s some level of specialisation you need to be useful at any job, and in professional jobs, the reward (pay) grows quite quickly if you can develop specialised skills. Main “risk” is boredom I think. Even if ChatGPT wipes out all lawyers (no chance, but let’s pretend), lawyers can get other professional jobs as analysts etc.
Incidentally, I get email updates when you post summaries, but only see the blog posts on the monthly round-up. Is there a way to get an email when you publish a blog post?
Yeah, my initial point in this post was similar to Daniel Vassallo’s – range/entrepreneurship might be good for society, but not necessarily for the individual. Although I would equate entrepreneurship with range more than to specialisation since I think entrepreneurship requires a broad range of skills.
As for the email updates – you should be able to change settings by clicking the link to change your preferences at the bottom of any email. Let me know if that doesn’t work and I can look into it for you. By default, subscribers don’t get updates for new blog posts, because I didn’t want to raise my bar for publishing blog posts. Otherwise I’d agonise over whether each post was “worth” publishing, since I personally hate receiving too many emails from newsletters (not talking about yours obviously, just the random blogs I see online) and I assume others do too.