AASP Newsletter - May 2020

Lauren Tashman

During my PhD at Florida State University, I was extremely fortunate to serve as a research assistant under the direction of Drs. K. Anders Ericsson, David Eccles, and Paul Ward exploring expert performance in SWAT police officers and critical care nurses. The research aimed at identifying what experts “do” (i.e., how they think, what they notice, their ability to anticipate and make decisions, etc.) particularly under stress when compared to novices. Thus, I read these two books through that lens, but also through the lens of someone who uses case analyses to close the gap between education and real-world practice; has taught both full-time and part-time in graduate program; and has been a mentor for a decade now. I read Dark Horse first and after subsequently reading Range decided to combine the two books in this review given their complementary focuses as well as the fact that Range includes a chapter on Dark Horse.

About the Books
Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment is written by Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas. Dr. Ross is the Director of the Mind, Brain, & Education program, and leads the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Ogas is a neuroscientist and Director of the Dark Horse Project in the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. The premise of the book begins with the argument that the industrial revolution prompted an enduring age of standardization which promoted a “know your destination, work hard, and stay the course” approach to achieving success (p. 9). The authors argue that society has emerged now into an age of personalization that is in search of personal autonomy and individuality where people are fueled by purpose and the pursuit of fulfillment. Thus, the question is posed about whether our educational system and mindset matches this current reality—do we continue to promote and follow a standard formula and proposed recipe to achieve success? Or do we need to adapt and evolve in order to support and pursue finding our own paths and definitions of success? Throughout the book, Rose and Ogas include stories of Dark Horses (i.e., “those who triumph against the odds” or “an unexpected victor who had been overlooked because she did not fit the standard notion of a champion” p. 6) to explore the facets of this proposition, discuss what they have learned from their research, and provide insight into the dark horse mindset in service of helping readers pursue both excellence and fulfillment.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is written by David Epstein who also authored The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and was a keynote speaker at AASP 2017. The book focuses on the longstanding debate regarding specialization versus generalization and the role this could play in the ability to establish expertise. This debate has been prevalent for many years in youth sports and in the study of expertise development, but Epstein brings renewed food for thought on this issue and offers the idea that generalists might be positioned to triumph despite the world having become increasingly specialized. The book is an engaging read filled with stories and research on familiar topics like deliberate practice and motivation, beginning with a comparative look at Tiger Woods (i.e., early specialization with years of intense deliberate practice) versus Roger Federer (i.e., more of a generalist who later specialized). Essentially the pursuit of depth of knowledge and experience in one area is pitted against the pursuit of diversity of experience which allows one to develop themselves and their knowledge/skills into what Epstein refers to as akin to becoming a swiss army knife. His ultimate argument is not a message of “don’t specialize,” but rather the support of a pursuing means of exploring, experimenting, failing, and evaluating yourself against who you were yesterday rather than feeling left behind or comparing where you are against where others are.

Food for Thought: Applications to the Field
Without spoiling the books for those of you who haven’t yet read one or both, I’ll highlight just a few ideas and questions that might pique your interest:

• We embrace and promote the notion of a jagged profile to success with our clients, but do we embrace the same in our education/training and ourselves? In our education programs, how do we manage the potential conflicts between the structured educational system (e.g., grades and course plans) and CMPC process versus promoting learning that looks inefficient but is more powerful in the long-term? Do we accept or turn away (intentionally or unintentionally) Dark Horses?
• Taking this a step further, do we ourselves courageously pursue the desirable difficulties and experiments that would actually create this jagged profile to our journey which would sharpen our swiss army knife intentionally rather than just enduring and reflecting upon the adversities, challenges, and failures when they occur? What could you do for your “Saturday morning experiment”? How could you use this notion with a client?
• When we work with teams, organizations, and leaders, how do we integrate the notions of optimal culture (e.g., fit, contribution, psychological safety, trust) and cohesion (social, task) with those of individuality, authenticity, winding paths, and round pegs in square holes?
• When students choose their educational programs from the growing number of options (now undergraduate and graduate), are students encountering a shampoo problem?– an analogy for the paradox of choice—too many “shampoos” to choose from can challenge us just as much, but potentially in different ways, as having too few options to choose from? Are we providing sampling periods or specializing? Taking this a step further, do we cultivate and help students and potential consumers/clients know their choices and pursue match quality?
• There are many personality factors and mindsets that have, and continue to be, discussed in our line of work (e.g., growth mindset, dispositional optimism, explanatory style). These books add some additional ones to consider: Do you have a dark horse mindset? Are you a frog or a visionary bird, a T-shaped or an I-shaped person, a fox or a hedgehog, a generalist, specialist, or polymath? What about your clients? What are the pros and cons of different mindsets and personal factors?

Final Points
Ultimately and back to my expert performance roots, the lingering question I have after reading these two books is, how do we (students, practitioners, researchers, educators, clients) passionately and intentionally pursue mastery of our craft balancing the notion of deliberate practice with that of the intentional (i.e., not aimless) winding path? And as we develop our expertise, how do we make sure it is adaptive and evolving in service of the uniqueness and complexity of performance and the need for guarding against the expertise and other cognitive biases? I’ll end this review with a quote that resonated from each book:

I never stood with my thumb out. I walked. And those of us who were successful, we all walked for a while. Eventually we got picked up, but we got help because someone saw us walking and everybody likes to see someone moving forward. But nobody likes to see someone standing around with their thumb out, waiting to get picked up (Rose & Ogas, p. 93). 

Even now, even in endeavors that engender specialization unprecedented in history, there are beacons of breadth. Individuals who live by historian Arnold Toynbee’s words that ‘no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.’ (Epstein, p. 267).

References

Epstein, D. (2019). Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. NY: Riverhead Books.

Rose, T., & Ogas, O. (2018). Dark Horse: Achieving success through the pursuit of fulfillment. NY: HarperCollins.