Thinking books · Problem solving · David Epstein, 2019

Range — the big ideas

A case that breadth and late specialisation often beat early narrow focus.

Free — no account needed to read

The big ideas

Kind learning environments give clear, fast, repeating feedback and reward specialisation. Wicked ones do not, and most important problems are wicked — so patterns learned in one can mislead in the other.

Analogies drawn from distant domains are the mechanism behind a lot of breakthrough problem solving, and only people with breadth have them available.

Sampling widely before committing is treated as efficient rather than as lost time, because match quality between a person and a field matters more than a head start.

Practise it — no need to have read it

Take a problem in your field. Ask how a completely different domain handles the same structural issue — a hospital, a restaurant, a library.

A hint: Then state exactly where the analogy stops holding. That boundary is where the thinking is.

Where it shows up in real life

• Career decisions
• Innovation
• Hiring for unfamiliar problems

Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.