Range

Range shows that having a broad spectrum of skills and interests and taking your time to figure them out is better than specializing in just one area.

Remember before when I mentioned Tiger Woods starting golf at a young age? Roger Ferderer, one of the best tennis players in the world and longtime friend of Woods’, reached athletic stardom in quite a different way.

As a child, he dabbled in many other sports including skiing, basketball, tennis, skateboarding, and badminton. He believes trying this diverse collection of sports helped him develop the impressive hand-eye coordination and athleticism he has today. He didn’t focus on tennis until he was a teenager, showing us it’s okay to try things out until you find what you like.

This kind of sampling is even good in disciplines like music. Believe it or not, world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma actually first played the piano and violin. It was his distaste for those instruments that led him to the cello. In a study of British boarding school students, a music psychologist John Sloboda found that those who took music lessons early in development were categorized as average musicians, while those who tried out three instruments were often identified as exceptional.

Van Gogh of all people showed us it’s okay to take your time and test the waters before you choose a specialty. The famous painter tried working in bookstores, art dealing and even preaching before discovering his true calling was to be an artist. All of this goes to show that if you haven’t yet found your life’s calling, relax-experiment with many different things so you can find what’s really best for you.

When researchers wanted to see what made certain comic creators successful,  they hypothesized the more comics a particular creator had published, the more successful their comics would be.

To their surprise, having made more comics or even having better resources weren’t what made a comic creator more successful. What made them successful was a large breadth of experience in diverse comic genres. The more genres a creator had worked in, the more successful they were.

Having a breadth of experience is linked to being more innovative and successful.

When you compare Nobel-prize winning scientists to regular scientists, you will find that Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely to do something else too, such as being an amateur actor or performer of some kind.

Epstein makes a plea that hiring managers think outside of the box and avoid clearly defined job descriptions. There needs to be space for the people who don’t neatly fit into one category because their range of experience will be an invaluable addition to the workplace.