The case for Range

Book Review: Range by David Epstein

Is it better to learn more deeply than more broadly? Can ‘mental meandering’ be turned into a productive pursuit? Is there such a thing as being fooled by expertise? What is ‘T’ shaped knowledge?

For those with a wide-ranging set of interests, the premise of the book is engaging: that of breadth of knowledge built on a bedrock of clear thinking, rather than laser-focused domain expertise bereft of the benefit of eclectic interests.

This book stands out in a world where specialisation is seen as the ultimate form of expertise. He starts off by making clear the differences between 'kind' and 'wicked' (his words) learning environments, and demonstrates that relentless practice may work for the former and may fail miserably in the latter. A 'kind' learning environment is one where rules are well-defined and where practice makes perfect. A 'wicked' one, which is the category most real world endeavours fall into, calls for a fresh way of thinking, of solving problems by synthesising across various domains, and in general, for people to have breadth of knowledge, rather than depth in a particular specialisation.

The author has flung his net far and wide across history and comes up with examples ranging from 17th century Venetian musicians to modern day Nobel laureates to demonstrate his point. Apart from this, he talks about the gaps in our education system (even in the First World) which is oriented towards nudging students to arrive quickly at the right answers rather than spending time understanding problems and thinking through them deeply to arrive at a solution.

Range has its share of overturned truisms, even as it creates new ones. For those who start to acquire a skill later in life, the 'Don't feel behind' advice is certainly heartening. So also with 'mental meandering' being a source of power, and head-starts being overrated. But some of this advice is to be taken with caution, with appreciation of the context. Some of his conclusions may seem tough to practise in the world as it is today. Being a 'deliberate amateur' in a world that demands very specific skills to count one's contribution as worthy of value can be problematic. It may be that van Gogh meandered through various dead ends before becoming a sensation. But such examples make for fascinating anecdotes rather than evidence of a trend.

Some of the examples illustrate how essential it is for experts to break free from their silos and trenches and collaborate across disciplines. Specifically, the need for experts with "T" shaped knowledge, which means depth in any field with breadth across multiple other fields, makes tremendous sense. Even in the examples in the book, a vast number are of specialists who bridged several streams of knowledge, while a smaller number is dedicated to plain vanilla generalists who struck gold.

As someone who believes in the power of the polymath, maybe I expected more from this book grounded in the current world. I would posit that specialisation is inescapable to showcase the 'grit' that he talks so much about. Having said that, specialists should take their lessons from this book, and avoid falling into the trap of being fooled by expertise, and be open to solutions that arise from outside of their proficiency.

Where I agree with the author completely is on the need to flip the education system over to one that values showing your approach to problem solving rather than rewarding the shortest path to success.

A closing caveat from my point of view: while it is good to know something about everything, there is no merit to it unless you know (almost) everything about something. In short, this book is not to be read as a validation of the ‘jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none’ school. Rather, the case made is for ‘master-of-not-just-one' but ‘jack-of-some-other-trades-too’.

Epstein manages to shatter the belief that super-specialisation is the only way to expertise, and this book will certainly spawn a whole genre around cross-disciplinary thinking. 

Flight to Safety

If you had told me a few years ago that the most striking parallels for the irrational behaviour of markets would come to me not from my perch in the trading floor, but from a bawling child, well…you could’ve knocked me down with a teether. Or pacifier.

Again, had you told me then that there existed a tube-like contraption to extract snot from a creature suffering from a blocked nose, one that didn’t know how to blow its nose, I would most likely have recoiled in distaste. So, it is quite telling that when I was recently introduced to that very contraption, I fell upon it like a pile of bricks, dubbing it the most useful thing invented since MTR Ready-to-Eat.

Markets flit about amongst a set of behaviours that at best times, confound even the most seasoned of practitioners. Risk aversion is that strange thing that causes traders to withdraw into their shells, like a beachful of turtles facing a predator onslaught. It makes them take refuge in old, predictable things like gold, the US dollar and the Japanese yen. And abandon the tantalizing yet risk-fraught plays with more complex financial instruments. This behaviour can play out in counterintuitive and fascinating ways, such as US Treasury bills finding favour when the US was downgraded or the surge in the Japanese yen when a tsunami wreaked havoc in Japan.

So what has all of this got to do with de-blocking a baby’s nose? Well, more than you would think. Like any right-thinking being, my child absolutely abhorred the idea of this thingamajig that (to toddler-eyes) I had clearly thought up as a punishment, a brand new ‘time out’ idea. So, there was much protestation, and I as the perpetrator, would surely bear the brunt of baby-wrath? As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Just like the markets, the baby also has a strange concept of flight-to-safety. When subjected to a snot-clearing attack by the mother, rush to the safest thing you know, ergo, the self-same mother who mounted said attack. For the rest of that day, she resisted all attempts by the father and others at soothing, and clung to me.

Now you know why markets are irrational. They are just the macrocosm of grown up babies.

The neglected Daffodils

I logged in securely to the cloud
From my cottage up in the hills,
At once a part of the working crowd,
Unseeing of the golden daffodils
Beside my window, and of the trees-
Scant feeling their blissful breeze.

I saw the light on my laptop shine
And slowly worked my winding way,
Through the jobs queuing on my line,
Undiscerning of the beauty of the bay.
At sprightly waves, not a glance,
Just fingers on keypad: dreary dance.

I gazed upon the hills, but They,
The lines of code beckoned in glee;
No time to wool-gather, or be gay,
Just gadgets to give me company!
I typed and typed and little thought
To what state the world has us brought:

Plodding done, that night I lie.
To soothe my flustered, fitful mood.
Timelines, texts, catch my eye
Claiming all vestiges of solitude.
And by dance of devices the void fills,
In this world of neglected daffodils.

---

I wrote this a few years ago in a 'Poetry Workshop' in response to this prompt: Using only the last word of each line of a well-known poem, write a new poem.
As you may have already guessed, I gathered the last word of each line of Wordsworth's 'I wandered lonely as a cloud', more popularly known simply as Daffodils and wrote this.

Meditations

The world of changing lights and shades
Of colours and shapes that blind and haze
Where nothing has ever stayed the same
Heaves and pants in a mindless daze.

Seems it at times to embrace and glow
And its things and beings amaze and thrall.
Its fleeting truth is known but by a few
And the herds drift on, seeing nothing at all.

As the cup of joy shall the mind gladden
The train of woe's never far behind.
Pleasure, pain do come unbidden
Falter not, or be caught in their bind.

The world without shall ever elude
As the Unreal can never be.
But know that the Real shall ever pervade
Oh inner eye! Grant that I may see.

This digital day

Time was when heroes held sway
Aloof, aloft a pedestal.
But, in this digital, un-private day,
Walls crumble, veils dissolve.
Unthinking tweet, vicious leak
Auras fade
Myths pale

Leaving agape feet of clay.

The Humpty Dumpty effect

When, according a well-known children’s rhyme, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall from a wall, he could never be put together again. Not even by all the horses and men of the King himself. But, what of humans who suffer such great falls? Many, in recent times, seem to have no trouble surviving rather nasty falls from great heights in the sporting, corporate and other such worlds. I was reminded of this contrast when reading about Rajat Gupta’s book.

Isn’t the greatest tragedy the burden such sordid cases place on those of us who seek role models? Too often have we seen inspiring individuals beat great odds to rise to the very top, and then, shockingly, throw it all away through lapses of ethics.

More than a decade ago, I, and undoubtedly many others, had read and re-read Lance Armstrong’s stirring memoirs ’It’s not about the bike’ and ‘Every Second counts’, and been inspired by this story of a sportsperson who came back from a debilitating illness to reclaim the pinnacle of the sport. It was, if you will pardon the cliché, the stuff of true legend. So much so, that when the downward spiral started with the US Anti-Doping Agency accusing him of orchestrating ‘the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen’, I took refuge in disbelief. When finally, he was stripped of all his titles and he admitted on television to his guilt, I felt tremendously cheated. Cheated that I had let my imagination be fired by someone who turned out to be a trickster. That I had lost an exemplar. That I had spent time on, what seemed in the light of the new events, a fictional account than a moving, personal story.

At the same time, I know there were some who could not help wondering: What did the general public gain from this knowledge? Would they have been better off if, somehow, they had been shut off from this news and had continued to draw from the uplifting narrative of his memoirs?

Such questions illustrate how difficult it is, for the community as a whole, to come to terms with falls of the successful from great heights. Which is why, I find it truly astounding where the perpetrators themselves get rapidly back on their feet and set about reinventing themselves.

I am a believer in second chances. That people should be able to explain themselves, their actions and have a shot at redemption. But what happens when the individual turns out to be a redemption-entrepreneur, whips out the smoke-and-mirrors and doles out inspiration from his (former) life of infractions?

Case in point, Jordan Belfort. While certainly not an angel, though fallen, his is a fascinating case study.  He staged a series of scams involving unsophisticated investors and penny stocks, and was found guilty of stock fraud. Sentenced to prison, he was ordered to pay restitution to his victims, a saga fraught with accusations of evasion, claims and negotiations. After serving prison time, he found an opportunity to lionise himself, by writing a book, as The Wolf of Wall Street (though his stockbroking racket had nothing to do with Wall Street by any stretch of imagination). Hollywood promptly took the bait and turned it into an over-the-top movie laced generously with recreational drugs and evocative expletives that they like to believe is the stuff of Wall Street.

What is truly staggering is Belfort’s extended second career as a motivational speaker, running seminars on, amongst other things, ethics and entrepreneurship. The going rate per session ran into tens of thousands of dollars. Sense of irony, anyone?

And then there are true angels, who have collapsed from high pedestals. Rajat Gupta exemplified the rise of the underdog on more than one dimension. Without going into his early struggles, suffice it to say that his story captured the idea of the American meritocracy. White-collar crime accusations and prison time later, he is setting out to rebuild himself, the first step of which is the publication of his book.

I happened to read an acquaintance’s glowing review of the book, its leadership lessons and life-changing potential, with zero mention of culpability of any sort. That made me wonder if Gupta had pulled off the impossible, and written off the sins of his past through the pages of his book. I would have expected the book’s motif to be one of two: either defence of his actions and motives, or remorse.  It turned out to be neither. Instead, the purpose lies in taking firm control of the narrative, and telling the story he believes unfolded in front of his eyes. There is his toil, his success, his dismay at his fall from grace, disaffection with the judicial system, his distress at his former employer and associates, and his quest for forgiveness. He is acutely aware that he has failed all those who looked up to him, and he wants to make amends. But when there is no attempt to own up, what, one wonders, is he seeking forgiveness for? He had the option to testify in court, under oath, and he passed up the chance, apparently on advice from his lawyers. How does one square that against his seeking of forgiveness? What I see is an endeavour to come to terms with the future, without working hard to efface the demons of the past.

This only makes it harder for the average person to come to terms with the shattering of icons. In the end, idols and their lofty pedestals are of our own creation. We have no means to demand accountability. And by that, I don’t mean the accountability that courts are able to enforce. I mean staying true to the idea of success that kindles the imagination of the people.    

What claim do we, the interested observers, have on their lives? How do we make them as invested in their conscience as the world clearly is?

So many questions, and I’m no closer to answers.

War

They live…

In a world where -  in twists of faith

Wars witless, wanton - germinate.

Where rent asunder by treacherous nets 

Of loyalties, the cruel irony of bomber jets

Scorching out guileless lives to quell genocide

Is lost - In a babble of toxic bromide

Called statecraft, or in slant sanctimony 

Or saving your skin or craving for vainglory.

We struggle…

To make sense of a war where the hunted

No longer know what they dread

More: the hunter they must evade

Or the ‘helpers’ who must their skies raid

With unseeing bombs that discern not

The hunter and these, the hunted lot.

Hah! What’s a bit more collateral

Damage- Arggh! This grisly carousel!

You agonise…

To make room -when these, the forlorn

With woeful hope arrive, worn-

For debate. Dry, cool, academic-

All this acrimonious human arithmetic!

‘Hurt’ by fleeing sparks and fading embers 

Of distant flames of your own timber!

We all rue…

No higher rage than faith to fight turned

Nor a fury as a spent ally scorn’d!

Flocci-nocci-what?

Those who have been through the mental, physical and emotional wringer that is the Indian educational system, chiefly of the variety that slotted teenage children into two groups: (prospective) engineers & doctors, and further classified the former class of adolescents into GRE-takers and CAT-crackers, will be no strangers to the art of expanding one’s English vocabulary by committing to memory words that drip with preponderance, sound staggeringly pretentious when used, and that lends one the presumptuousness needed for floccinaucinihilipilification of the system that produced them.

Like any corporate group, your vocabulary also has two pathways for its growth strategy: organic and inorganic.  Some choose to go about it in the organic way: boring, old-fashioned. Gleaned from reading books of various genres and periods across one’s lifetime. Some choose inorganic, achieved by spending a weekend with Barron’s. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I belong to the former group and whether or not I turned up my nose at the latter. Of course, there are nihilists who don’t believe that words are our ultimate source of magic, and drip disdain,” Say, you really think knowing  gasconade from gasbag is going to save you when the cyborgs come for us?” To them, at the risk of repeating myself, I have just one thing to say, “You, madam, are a first-rate floccinaucinihilipilificator!” Bam! QED et al.

Secretly, I had to agree with them, though, that some words have only curiosity value and cannot be expected to pop up in any conversation, particularly if the interlocutors have to maintain straight faces. And particularly if you don’t want to the give the other party a chance to smirk (as a beloved period character said once), “My, my, have you swallowed a dictionary?”

Until recently.

For those of us who are in drab corporate jobs or stuck in high-octane dealing rooms where the only scope of learning or rediscovering words are either if they are given to a newly-minted charting pattern or creative expletives hurled at the unexpected turns being taken by inflation or the inversion of yield curves (I can I can neither confirm nor deny whether I belong to the latter group), deliverance arrives from a completely astonishing quarter. In the form of policymakers of the central bank, no less, deigning to use words that you had no hope of glimpsing outside of your long-forgotten and much-maligned study material.

To my old friends, the vocab- floggers, I can finally say that ‘curiosity’ words have finally found a useful economic function: the much-vaunted ‘surprise element’ in the policymaker’s toolkit.

I rest my case.

Heck, not yet. Just one parting shot.

If you can keep your vocab when all about you,

                Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can tell the difference between capacious and commodious

                And yet not equivocate too

Then you can be a central banker, my girl!

A tribute to an icon

The founder, mentor and beloved godmother of the PSBB Schools, a icon in the fields of education, arts and culture, Mrs.YGP is no longer with us.

As I attempt to pen a tribute to the legend that was Mrs.YGP, I balk at the enormity of the task. A woman far ahead of her times, a multi-faceted personality, a role model, an inspiration for generations of students and teachers, and above all, a person overflowing with positivity and zest.

A true visionary, she was able to bring to life the idea of top-notch, global education with an Indian ethos. She applied herself with enthusiasm to the task, travelling the world to gather ideas and adapt these to the needs of her students. Decades before 'learning by doing' became a norm or even an aspiration, she gave her students laboratories not just for science but also mathematics and language. She invited parents to observe classroom activities to understand first-hand the style and quality of teaching their children were receiving. Ever willing to try new ideas, she gave her students and teachers the ability to challenge existing wisdom on pedagogy, and built a great reputation for the school in academic excellence. 

Equally, she immersed herself in ensuring all-round development of students, and encouraged her students to excel in the sports field and the stage, to appreciate all the fine things in life. At every school event, she was a rapt observer and perceptive commentator, ever available with feedback and encouragement. 

Apart from her credentials as a world-class educator, what endeared her further to us, were her credentials as a lifelong student. What greater inspiration can there be for a student than to see this dynamic lady studying for her doctorate at the ripe age of 70?

A good friend of mine had the fortune of meeting her and listening to her give a speech, as succinctly as ever, at the school annual day just weeks ago. I was not there, but I can picture her, hear her crisp eloquence, pointed observations and fitting remarks.

It is my belief that she would want us to not merely mourn her passing, but to celebrate a life well lived, to cherish and to build on her legacy.

My humble salutations Shri Gurubhyo Namaha to this teacher of teachers as she leaves, one last time, the classroom that was her life. 

I can almost hear a beaming Sukhi Bhava in response.