Stars: ★★★★★ (Study This Book)

Premise

Starting with a detailed comparison of the roads to greatness for Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, Epstein explains the differences between hyper-specialization and developing a range of shallower skills. The American system of sending a child to school, asking them what they want to be when they grow up, and then expecting them to follow a direct path to that profession is not only unrealistic but also not ideal for integration and innovation.

He then describes the difference between a kind and wicked learning environment and how the most challenging human problems exist in particularly wicked environments. Kind environments have repetitive problems in which there is immediate feedback and ability to correct mistakes the next time around, using golf and chess as examples. Wicked environments have unique problems with no immediate feedback – solving systemic hunger, vaccine creation, or Nintendo game development. These require accepting risk and surviving failure in order to succeed. The path to the end is not linear or efficient, which makes it less than ideal in the current school-to-career pipeline.

Loved

1. Hyper-specialization can lead to disastrous outcomes
   Epstein details multiple places where hyper-specialization leads to disastrous outcomes, including the Challenger and the Columbia tragedies at NASA. The experts were so dependent on data that when the engineers highlighted a potential problem using only two comparative pictures and a brief explanation, the issue was not taken seriously enough. Because the entire agency operated with the same mindset, it did not allow for enough multi-way communication that could have led to successful launches.
   
   Even though he champions a wide range of skills, he lists the kind environments in which specialization maximizes results, specifically airline emergencies and surgeries. These are the types of situations in which you benefit from having an experienced team that has worked together before and has repeated the same operation often. In this way, and in multiple places throughout the book, he highlights the necessity of specialists. The generalists depend on the specialists for expert information; both are necessary for the widest range of success. However, one of the biggest take-aways from the book is that people should not feel shoe-horned into a specialty if they have an interest in a wide variety of areas.
   
2. Play and exploration are the best teachers
   It is important to figure out who you are and what are you good at before you decide what you want to do for a career, which is exactly the opposite of the message we give to children en masse. Epstein discusses graduation speeches where seniors are told to imagine who they want to be in twenty years, figure out the steps to get there, and then follow their dreams. But for so many people, they don’t know who they want to be at 18 years old, especially when the school system is set up to have students regurgitate information instead of explore their lives and interests.
   
   This is true for young children, but not only for young children. There is a trend to start teaching children at younger and younger ages, but young children do not need formal lessons – they need to play. They need to play outside, play with messy things, play with toys that don’t make noise, and play with art. They learn best by exploration. This is just as true for elementary children, teenagers, and adults. We learn the most when we are having fun, so explore the things you enjoy. Does this mean that you only take jobs that you will love? No. But you are also more than your job, so find joy in many areas in your life by trying to new things and going on new adventures.
   
3. There is no such thing as “behind”
   “The only behind in homeschooling is the one you sit on.” The first time I read this, I laughed out loud. It’s true though. In homeschooling, it is easier to see that learning does not end at 18, so there is no reason to cram all knowledge into a child by that age. Each child has different strengths and will learn at their own pace. Expecting every child to know the same thing at the same age is like expecting each child to wear the same size clothes at every age – it’s completely unreasonable.
   
   Epstein details how the same is true for adults. We don’t all find our purpose in life right out of college. Maybe college is not even the right place to go after high school. There is no one path that works for everyone or one age that you should be “successful” by. Long term goals are important, but you should also be making choices based on what makes sense in the short term too. Slogging through years in a job that drains all your life and time so one day you might get a promotion may seem like a good long term plan, but tomorrow is not promised. Do what you are good at and enjoy now, which will lead to other opportunities.
   
4. Teaching people how to think is more important than teaching them facts
   I believe one of the reasons that disinformation is so common today is that as a society, we do not teach our children to think critically about information. There is no systemic way in which we teach our children to evaluate sources. I remember learning this in history class my sophomore year of high school, but we should be instilling this as a value far earlier. We need to show children (and adults) how to summarize an argument from someone else before they add their own opinions. This increases communication if we help them learn to listen for understanding instead of listening to respond. Once they have an understanding of the other person’s perspective, they can evaluate that argument based on a variety of inputs before then coming to their own perspective on it.
   
   Facts are easy to memorize. Learning to think critically is much harder but so much more important. We have factual information at our immediate disposal, but the internet is never going to be able to do our thinking for us.

Didn’t Love

Epstein’s writing is engaging and fact-filled, but the book is still dense. It takes some time to get through, so this is not a light afternoon read. The stories and illustrations are exemplary though and worth every minute of reading.

Lessons Learned

• Money is the driving factor is hyper-specialization – this was eye-opening for me. Who benefits from hyper-specialization? The trainers that we hire for our children to hone skills early. The colleges that extort money from students to take more and more classes. The “job skills” seminars that people pay to go to. Generalization is less efficient, and therefore, less likely to make money, especially in the short term. Here in America, if something is not making money, it is often not considered worth.
  
• Frequent failure is a side effect of huge success. This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for those of us who were praised for our successes most of our lives. But if we want to have huge successes, we have to take big risks. Risks by definition are as likely to end in failure as they are in success. So we have to get comfortable allowing failure to be a teacher.

• The sunk cost fallacy is costly. This one is so important, even as we are raising children. One of the biggest lessons I learned from unschooling is not to interrupt a child at work. But if you pay for a child to go to a museum for the day, you expect them to see everything in the museum, even if they are fascinated by a single exhibit “because we paid for it.” Maybe it’s forcing a child to finish music lessons they hate “because we paid for it” when that could easily lead them to hate the instrument. As an adult this can look like a company sticking with one plan when it is clearly not working “because we put so much money into it.” Removing the sunk cost fallacy means looking at investments as learning opportunities – even if it means we have learned this is not what we want to be doing.