Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World a book by David Epstein

especially in postmodern life, where rote tasks are increasingly automated and pretty much any fact can be discovered with a web search, the rules aren’t straightforward. What it takes to be great is intellectual flexibility.

We’ve come to believe that people who specialize early and narrowly—like Tiger Woods, who was already on national television golfing at age 2—have an insurmountable advantage. But the research shows that those stories are in fact the rare exception en route to success, and typically confined to repetitive domains, in which work next year will look ... See more

They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And

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