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Rated Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World 8/10

The book mainly presents supporting evidence for the theory that late starters and broad generalists achieve more groundbreaking results. I take it with a grain of salt though due to obvious survival bias in the book and the absence of study of general life satisfaction of those late starters who failed to achieve groundbreaking results. And maybe it's not really about results anyway?<br/><br/>I still liked the stories and studies presented in the book. For example I've heard before studies of efficiency of diverse teams compared to homogeneous teams, but didn't know that broadly experienced individuals are more creative than diversely specialized teams.<br/><br/>I've also looked at the famous Challenger disaster study from a new perspective. The idea that you need to know when to drop your most entrenched principles (or identity defining tools) is very important.<br/><br/>The chapter on Grit was probably most thought provoking though. As it turns out, those high achievers are not necessarily that gritty and "knowing what you want" and "sticking to your goals" might be a dumb idea in the long run.

#book

Published 2026-02-15 10:03 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere