Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company.

Today we have a very special guest joining us, somebody who has basically reshaped how we think about success and achievement.

His book, Range, has challenged the conventional wisdom and showing us why generalists often thrive in a specialized world.

David Epstein, what a pleasure to have you here. The pleasure is mine.

Thanks for having me.

I'm just going to start with a kind of a stupid question, given that we are going to talk about

generalists and specialists for a bit of a time here.

So what is a generalist in your view?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, there's some semantic aspect to it, right?

Like, when I think about my own career,

I used to be training to be a scientist,

and then I got off that track

and became the science writer at Sports

Illustrated magazine. And so when I did that, my science colleagues suddenly thought of me as a

generalist, whereas my sports writing colleagues suddenly thought of me as a specialist,

because I had this science background. But I think broadly speaking, it's someone that at a certain

points or at a certain point sacrifices increasing depth to

broaden themselves and sort of connect knowledge and broaden their own toolbox as opposed to just

kind of going with what tends to be natural momentum of getting deeper and deeper and more

narrow as you progress and why is it a good? What are the advantages of being a journalist?

Yeah, I think the advantages particularly stand out because the world is getting more specialized.

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