David Epstein: RANGE (special interests, ADHD, Autism)
- A Novel Mind
- 60 minutes ago
- 7 min read
An interview with Sally J. Pla
Now adapted for young readers, David Epstein’s #1 New York Times bestseller Range is full of inspiring stories of athletes, musicians, artists, and scientists, determining that excellence and expertise is built off of trying many things, rather than specializing at a young age.
SJP: David Epstein, allow me to offer you such a warm welcome to A NOVEL MIND. Thank you for adapting your insightful and fascinating book, RANGE, for young readers.
First off, I'd love to consider your premise that "Excellence and expertise is built from trying many things, rather than specializing at a young age."
I'm so interested in this -- because in autistic and ADHD kids, there is often a penchant for having a deep-dive single "special interest" that can sometimes last a lifetime. (Very deep depth, rather than breadth!). And this is certainly to be respected and honored. Yet, as your premise makes clear, diversifying one's range of interests is clearly very life-enriching, and excellent for one's brain!
So, how can we help these young people branch out a bit? Are there examples in your book about how your subjects have gone about diversified their interests/skills?
David Epstein: This is a fantastic question, and I absolutely agree that having a deep-dive special interest is to be respected—and celebrated, really. One of the benefits of trying different things that I highlight in Range is the ability to improve “match quality”—the degree of fit between one’s interests, abilities, and what one does. Perhaps autistic and ADHD kids are able to find good match quality more quickly than others, and without spending as much time sampling other activities, interests, classes, or jobs.
If that’s the case, that’s fantastic! I had to zig-zag through several interests and even careers before finding a real passion, and while I think I benefited from many of those zig-zags, I wouldn’t have minded finding my way a little more quickly.
The research shows that, for most people, their insight into themselves—their interests and abilities—is really limited by their roster of previous experiences. So they have to try things to learn where they fit. I’m certainly no expert in autistic and ADHD kids, but I wonder if they have some unique qualities that allow them to home in on true interests and talents more quickly. If so, that’s a great thing.
The challenge then is how to capture some of the benefits of breadth even after identifying a special interest early. This actually reminds me of Andy Ouderkirk, the inventor described in chapter seven, who created the film layer that saves energy in all of our computer and phone screens.
Ouderkirk had a very deep specialty in an area of chemistry, but over years he worked with many different teams with different expertise, and he learned other areas of science and technology from those people. That’s what allowed him to make a breakthrough. After his own breakthrough, he helped conduct a study of thousands of inventors at 3M, where he worked, and they found a pattern: the most impactful inventors were neither just deep nor just broad, but a combination.
Sometimes they began their careers with deep expertise and then worked with people from different specialties; other times they started broad and later drilled deeper into one area that interested them. The order didn’t matter so much as learning how to connect one area of deep knowledge to others. It’s great to have an area of expertise—but if you can connect that area to others, it’s like a superpower.
So I wouldn’t steer autistic and ADHD kids away from their special interest, but I would encourage them to proactively interact or work with people with different interests. There are many ways to do that, including teaching what you know to others and paying attention to their questions.
I obviously have my own areas of interest, particularly in science, and I’m fortunate to get invited to events where I talk about them on stage. I learn so much from the audience’s questions, which often come through the lens of their own expertise. So I would just encourage a willingness to be in situations where you can share your interest and learn about other people’s special interests. It will make your world bigger, and sometimes you’ll make a connection that sparks new thoughts, projects, or friendships.
SJP: Thank you for these insights about match quality, and having a homing sense about what interests truly fit -- while staying open to potentially more.
Admittedly there are also many ADHD/autistic kids out there who actually DO have many different interests. Or serial interests. To use myself as an example, my childhood consisted of: (1) collecting Barbie shoes, (2) obsessing about birding, (3) learning New York Rangers trivia, (4) studying the WW2 years in England, (5) deep-diving into the life of Chopin. I was consumed with learning every possible thing about each subject. Each became the major part of my personality, until I moved on to the next.
My question is: How important is "WHAT" you choose to study/do?
(My special-interest choices were, ahem, not very marketable!)
In the examples in your book, were the varied subjects deliberately or calculatedly pursued? Or was there happenstance and accidental synergy?
DE: So you say none of those interests were very marketable skills, and on the face of it, that’s true. But I’m looking at your website and noticing the breadth of things you do now—communicating with readers via fiction and nonfiction, with words and pictures, and doing public-facing communication on podcasts, news interviews, etc. From my vantage point, it looks like you are very capable of managing a lot of information. That comes easier to some people than others, but, like any skill, it can and should be cultivated.
There’s a phrase that a famous psychologist told me when I was researching Range that basically summarizes a huge body of work on skill development: “Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer.”
Transfer is your ability to take knowledge or skills and apply them in new ways or to new problems. Your ability to do that is predicted by the diversity of challenges and types of information you’ve dealt with in the past. So in that way, I would suggest your diversity of interests was preparing you for work in which you’d be handling, connecting, and communicating a diverse array of information.
You were also learning how to learn new things—which is increasingly important in a world where very few people can expect to do the same thing for their entire life. The benefits of early diverse learning have analogies in domains like sports and languages. Kids who try a variety of sports early on, or who grow up with multiple languages, will often have slower initial progress, but later have an advantage for learning new skills or languages.
There’s a long-term advantage to diverse early learning, and, particularly early on, the specific content is less important than the degree of engagement in learning truly new skills or information. Eventually, we all specialize to one degree or another, but there’s a benefit in bringing a broad toolbox when you get there. To me, this gets at a real theme that colors just about every page of Range: that an apparent head start can sometimes undermine long-term development.
Now, do I think it would be useful in a practical sense for kids (and people in general) to be playing with AI tools now? I absolutely do, and that’s something you can explore via any one of those interests you mentioned.
One last minor point specific to you: You’re a fiction writer, and I think fiction writers have to have enormously long antennae, so to speak, that they stick out into the world to capture information. That allows them to share interesting things, put themselves in other people’s shoes, and construct imagined scenarios and characters that feel emotionally true. In that sense, I’d argue you’ve been training for a very long time!
SJP: I cannot tell you how much I loved that fascinating answer. Thank you so much for all your insights. And finally, a wrap-up question: What do you hope young people's takeaways will be, after reading this book? What, especially, do you hope autistic/ADHD kids could learn from it?
DE: First, I hope that the subtitle will stick with them: How Exploring Your Interests Can Change the World. But I also don’t think changing the world has to be the goal; it’s important to change just your world! There’s plenty of research showing both that we don’t really know ourselves until we try things and reflect, and also that we aren’t very good at predicting how we will change in the future—in pretty much all aspects of our lives and personalities.
We actually underestimate our own future change at every stage of life. We’re works in progress constantly claiming to be finished.
So one takeaway I’d hope for is that kids should not artificially limit the scope of their interests, and that exploration and learning are lifelong journeys—because both you and the world are in constant flux. The way you learn about yourself and the world, and improve your match quality, is by constantly exploring interests.
I would also hope they see the general importance of diverse thinkers. From research on how to make the best comic books to research on the biggest scientific breakthroughs, the message is that you really want diverse thinkers.
Sometimes those are individuals with tremendous breadth, and other times teams comprised of people with very different backgrounds and styles of thinking. In much of this research, if you put together a team of people with the same backgrounds and thinking styles, it’s not much better than just having one brain!
So I hope autistic/ADHD kids also come away with a little bit of confidence that being a different thinker than some of their peers can be a superpower in the long term—and make them especially valuable in group challenges.
David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene. He has master’s degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.