Federer's Formula
In defense of specializing late
To him who observes them from afar it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them. - Ramon y Cajal
Maybe I liked
’s book Range because it justifies my eclectic interests. I am a man of many hobbies: pizza making, coffee roasting, cycling, running, writing, and spending time with kids are just a few examples. At work, I feel most productive and in the flow when I’m working on multiple different and unrelated projects in parallel compared to focusing on a single topic in isolation.A natural response to the increasingly complex world we live in is to double down on specialization. As each individual field of study continues to grow in depth, it can feel like you need to decide earlier and earlier what you want to do when you grow up. While Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours thesis from his book Outliers works within some domains (chess and golf being good examples), Epstein’s case is that for most of us, it is much better to sample and build a wide range of skills instead of narrowly focusing on a few. In a world where artificial intelligence seems to be spurring the next technological Cambrian explosion, this advice seems timely.
In the introduction to the book, Epstein uses Roger Federer’s story to make the case that there might be a different path to a fulfilling career. Unlike Tiger Woods, who started swinging a golf club at about the same time he could stand up, Federer took a more circuitous route to his domain of mastery. Early in his life, he explored a wide range of athletic activities like skiing, wrestling, and swimming gravitating toward sports with a ball like basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, and soccer. Federer himself credits this early exploration of a wide range of sports for the hand-eye coordination that is so critical for world-class athletes.
As the world gets more and more complicated and each individual field of study continues to progress, it seems that the obvious choice is to be like Tiger and just start earlier. That the need to achieve depth requires us to decide as early as possible to build up the momentum we need to make an impact.
But the problems that most of us will face in our lives and careers are far different than the types of situations we might find ourselves in on the golf course or when playing a game of chess. In our careers, embracing specialization at the cost of surveying the fundamentals of a wide range of fields is a mistake. Ultimately a narrow scope of expertise will lead to a narrow impact as the most pressing questions facing our world, like renewable energy and artificial intelligence, are extremely interdisciplinary. Developing robust and effective solutions that support human flourishing will require not only a broad set of technical expertise, but also a deep consideration of economic, philosophical, and political factors as well.
The question I’ve been pondering this week is how might we approach life through the story of Roger Federer instead of Tiger Woods? What are unique areas of interest that while at first glance might seem totally irrelevant to making an impact in your career, might be the secret to bringing a fresh perspective to it? While they might seem like detours, the truth is that these interests that seem to spread our attention and energy are actually the spark that enables us to make creative connections and deepen our experience of joy and play.
While I think there are many benefits to specializing late, I want to focus on three:
Specializing late enables you to iterate quickly and sample broadly
Developing breadth helps to stimulate creativity
Exploring is playful and playing at work helps you work better
1. Specializing late enables you to iterate quickly
One obvious downside of specialization is that it requires a lot of time. To get really good at something, you need to invest time practicing it repeatedly in a variety of contexts. However, just like in athletic training, as you get better and better at something, your rate of growth will likely begin to slow as you meet the dreaded law of diminishing returns. The Pareto principle strikes again.
In contrast, developing a broad base helps to guard against getting stuck in any one trench for too long. By immersing yourself in a topic for a relatively short amount of time, you can build a general base of knowledge and understanding of the topic but avoid getting caught up in the minutiae. Of course, if you really want to master a field you’ll need to battle the law of diminishing returns to learn the nuances of the field with the level of knowledge that will allow you to become an expert. But, for most of us, we will be much better served investing that time in breadth instead of depth.
In the frame of the prototyping mindset, the ability to iterate quickly is important. The true power of a design process comes through its compounding effects which are overwhelmingly driven by the number of iterations, not the quality of any one iteration.
2. Range helps to stimulate creativity
Another benefit of cultivating interest and knowledge across a wide range of different areas is enhanced creativity. A lot of creativity is about finding new connections between ideas. If you’re only exposing yourself to a narrow set of inputs, it’s unlikely that you’ll find the creative inspiration to break out of the well-worn paths of those who have come before you.
This has many connections with my recent reflections on Rick Rubin and his perspective on the connections between creativity and being tuned in to the information all around us.
Post-It Notes were invented because Art Fry was annoyed that his bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal at choir practice.
Stephanie Kwolek, who grew up exploring the woods and inherited a love of fabrics and sewing from her mother, went on to invent Kevlar as a chemist at the DuPont Company.
Lonnie Johnson, while working as a JPL engineer, invented the super soaker while he was trying to use water instead of Freon as the working fluid for a heat pump he was developing. He was inspired to create a water gun when he saw how well some of the nozzles he was machining at home would spray water across his bathroom.
Just because things don’t seem to be obviously connected, doesn’t mean they aren’t.
3. Exploring is playful and playing at work helps you work better
In the last chapter of Range, Epstein shares the story of Oliver Smithies and his “Saturday morning experiments.” Smithies, a biochemist and geneticist who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Mario Capecchi for their work on homologous recombination, was famous for coming into the lab on Saturdays to explore crazy ideas. Part chemist and part cook, Smithies would let his brain roam freely and embrace the joy of experimentation.
One of Smithies’ most famous Saturday experiments led to the development of gel electrophoresis, a laboratory technique that is used to separate molecules like DNA, RNA, or proteins based on their size and charge. Smithies was working in a lab that focused on insulin and wanted to use gel electrophoresis to separate parts of the insulin for further study. But the insulin would just get stuck on the paper used in the process. Smithies had heard that some researchers at the local children’s hospital had tried moist starch grains instead of paper as the substrate and that this helped to solve the stickiness problem. Unfortunately, the grains had to be analyzed individually, which made the starch grain substrate less than ideal.
Then the lightbulb went off. As a kid, Smithies remembered watching his mom dip his dad’s work shirts into a sticky hot starch solution before ironing them. Smithies, tasked with taking care of the remnants of the starch, remembered that when the solution would cool, it would become a jelly. What about using this starch gel as the substrate for electrophoresis?
Inspired by his childhood memories, Smithies cooked up a starch gel and then tried it, finding that he had discovered a promising and practical way to solve the problem with the sticky insulin.
This story, along with others shared in Dan Pink’s book Drive, demonstrate the value of carving out time at work for undirected, playful projects. After World War II, 3M instituted 15% time to encourage employees to spend time innovating on projects unrelated to their other work.1 Google famously embraced a similar idea in the 20% project which led to some of its most successful products like Gmail, AdSense, and Google News. Even if it's only for a few hours a week, what would like it look like to more intentionally embrace play in your work?
So what?
Innovation is often more complicated and nonlinear than it looks in hindsight. It’s easy to think that to make the most progress we should just put our heads down and work. But the truth is that the journey to new insights is often more serendipitous than we might think. Great ideas are often sparked by random connections from experiences we had when we were a kid or from a walk out in the woods.
It’s just one more reason we need to reject work-life balance and embrace coherence instead.
This week as you go about your work, think like Federer. How could playing a different game help you to build breadth and bring fresh insights to the projects you’re working on?
The Book Nook
One of the best parts of Range is that it is filled with great stories. Below I’ve included a small subset of the many passages that resonated with me while I was reading.
Quotes
Commenting on the prevalence of the Roger Federer’s of the world over the Tiger Woods’s.
The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
On the different weaknesses of humans and machines.
Anything we can do, and we know how to do it, machines will do it better,” he said at a recent lecture. “If we can codify it, and pass it to computers, they will do it better.” Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, he recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
Beautiful advice for scientific discovery.
“To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”
Love this.
“It’s an old joke among jazz musicians,” Cecchini said. “You ask, ‘Can you read music?’ And the guy says, ‘Not enough to hurt my playing.’”
Former National Science Foundation chief Vannevar Bush writing on the value of basic research.
“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
The Professor Is In
This last week I had the great pleasure of giving a guest lecture in one of our technical elective courses, Human Centered Design. Human-centered design (HCD) is a field that I have been enjoying learning more about in the past few years. I really appreciate the lens that HCD uses to apply design thinking in a way that is considerate of the humans who will be impacted by the end product and involved in the process along the way. If you’re interested in a quick introduction to HCD, I would recommend this TED talk by David Kelley, the founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school.
For my lecture, I decided to focus on how we tell stories with data and give some examples of common mistakes that I see and would caution us to avoid. My short list of topics included:
Y-axis manipulation: make sure you show the place where the y-axis crosses zero!
Deceptive plotting: does the data you see actually convey the information you think it does?
Choose the right plot type: my screed against pie charts 😬
Color: Make sure you choose colormaps that are well-suited to the data you are showing.
As I was preparing my lecture I stumbled across this excellent book and website from Claus O. Wilke on the fundamentals of data visualization. If you spend any time at all plotting data, you should spend some time reading through what Claus has to say! As an aside, I’m a big fan of folks like Claus who embrace the philosophy of publicly sharing their course material on the web. You can find Claus’s full lecture notes and examples for his Data Visualization in R course at: https://wilkelab.org/SDS375/.
Leisure Line
Our annual tradition at church is to have our Easter Sunday service outside in the bandshell nearby our normal meeting location. We had a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning!
Still Life
A beautiful Dietes grandiflora (African iris) from our garden that I spotted on Sunday.
In fact, Arthur Fry’s Post-It Note invention was a product of 3M’s 15% project.
I love this so much. We need to diversify the way we learn and explore the world around us. We should cultivate an ethic of diverse interests, encouraging people to try new things just because they are curious.