Workers who received general education, the economists concluded, were better positioned to adapt to change in a wicked world, where work next year might not look like work last year. The early specializers often won in the short-term, and lost in the long run. The research pertains to every stage of life, from the development of children in math, music, and sports, to students fresh out of college trying to find their way, to midcareer professionals in need of a change and would-be retirees looking for a new vocation after leaving a previous one.

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 just like work last year-what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind learning environments.” Most of us are not working in kind learning environments it was eye-opening to learn about the advantages of breadth and delayed specialization. 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.

My book, Range, which came out in 2019, is a journey through that research, and it shows that most of us would be better off with the long version of that quote. In the nearly 430 years since that barb aimed at The Bard, researchers have compiled a mountain of work examining whether the Jack of all trades is, indeed, ever better than a master of one. Our notions of the relative merits of breadth versus specialization are often based on little more than adages like those above, but they needn’t be.

Book range david epstein