Reviews and Comments

Quite brilliant in that it takes what most consider self-evident: early specialization and focused training is what builds world-beating athletes and professionals, and turns it on its head. Epstein writes that for every story of a Tiger Woods, earliest and continued focus on a particular sport, profession, or pasttime, there is another story that shows the opposite, namely early and ongoing experimentation. Roger Federer and the 2014 Germany world cup team are two useful examples. Early and exclusive specialization are seen as detrimental when dealing with novel situations in "wicked" domains that do not maintain the same rules (unlike chess and golf, many or most situations in emerging industries or medical research need different skills to draw on). The power of analogies is brought to the fore. For those who are switching careers, know that this is very common and studies on countries which require early college specialization (such as Britain) vs. those that encourage or require a breadth of experience (such as Scotland) show that breadth outweighs depth in terms of an economic strategy. This applies as much to education, as athletics, as music and other arts. Van Gogh is another striking example of massive exploration and experimentation which led to tremendous breakthrough. Charles Darwin's chaotic and diverse interests before the post-college gap year on the Beagle is another fascinating and thunderous example. Bill Gates enjoyed this book and it is in his Gates' Notes book list. One can hear a somewhat discordant note though, as he doesn't advise people who are interested in a specialization to not "go for it" say in microbiology, but he nevertheless attributes early and ongoing success at Microsoft on having a range of expertise and he says that those who thought the broadest also thought the deepest and were the most interesting and engaging.

Excellent, excellent explanation and account of how history works (at least the agrarian societies). Quite a number of insights. The only letdown is in using obscure neologisms instead of coining more memorable terms. The concept of the frontier, "asabiya" (the degree to which a society can cooperate), and showing how a frontier can increase or decrease this element, as well as how classical economic theory cannot account for cooperation whatsoever. Secular cycles of rise and decline and father-son cycles of war and peace all account quite readily for much of history, amazingly enough. The well discussed point of modern empires being China, the US, and the EU are quite relevant. The real punch is when dealing with how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in agrarian societies and how it is based on inheritance and population growth. Inequality perpetuates and is occasionally reset (when the elite are decimated in one way or another). The most sobering element of this work is how we are now in an elite/anti-elite clash that has to play out as the government itself has become more incapable of corrective action due to the clash (the levers of government are rendered inoperable through the clash itself). Trump is a unique symptom and set of circumstances, but the underlying mechanism is there to be clearly perceived and understood for those who would read this excellent work.