I’m reading David Epstein’s book “Range” this week– it’s a fantastic book that talks about how generalists, rather than specialists, are primed for success. I love the book because it tells us that those of us who are “frequent quitters” will end up with the most satisfying careers; that failing a test is the best way to learn; and that generalists often find their path later in life. Having sampled other paths, they are creative, agile, and can make mental connections that specialists may not be able to see.
I am therefore now not too proud to say now that I have been a “frequent quitter,” and that I’ve tried many paths that did not work for me. Leaving out the early defeats (Girl Scouts, 4H, softball, etc), we can pick up in my 20’s with my Bachelor’s degree in Spanish; my career as an artist; my customer service/banking career; my culinary degree and subsequent failure to thrive as a personal chef. We should probably also include my two marriages, since they were not ultimately successful.
For years, I felt deeply shamed by all of these– that somehow, by not managing to make these things work, I was a failure myself. Or maybe the character flaw was that I was a bad chooser in the first place; that I was passionate about things that didn’t turn out to be a good fit. There were times where I felt like I couldn’t go on; that my mistakes were too terrible and bad, and there was no good way forward.
“Desirable difficulties,” says Eptsein, are “obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.” While the book’s researchers were studying university students’ ability to learn vocabulary, I think the metaphor works well here. The “wrong turns” I took in my early 20’s turned out to be the learning experiences I needed to grow into the adult that I am: creative, flexible, resourceful.
Even more interesting to me was what the researchers called “the hypercorrection” effect: “The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.”
“The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.” -WILLIAM EPSTEIN, RANGE: WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH IN A SPECIALIZED WORLD
My younger self was often quite (embarrassingly) confident of her choices, which meant that when it came time to admit defeat, it was sometimes a hard pill to swallow. There’s no doubt now those were the best learning opportunities. We remember most deeply the things that pain us the most.
Maya Angelou told us, “When you know better, you do better.” Our younger selves do the best they can so that our more mature selves can reap the benefits. Skills learned from earlier careers, relationships, and other “mistakes” translate into greater success in later life. R&B artist Ciara is a decade younger than I am, but she already knows:
Them old mistakes are gone, I won't do them no more
That's old news, there's new news, I done did that before
I turned nothing to something, my comeback on one hunnid'
Less talking, more action, you just gon' see Ci coming
I just keep elevating, no losses, just upgrading
My lessons, made blessings, I turned that into money
Thank God I never settled, this view is so much better
I'm chilling, I'm winning, like on another level.