Remember the '10,000 Hours' Rule for Success? Forget About It

Folk wisdom holds the trade-off between breadth and depth to be a cruel one: “jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” and so forth. And a lot of thinking in current pop-psychology agrees. To attain genuine excellence in any area — sports, music, science, whatever — you have to specialize, and specialize early: That’s the message. … But this message is perversely wrong — so David Epstein seeks to persuade us in “Range.”