What reading "Range" taught me about parenting

I approached being a father the same way I tackle every other experience in life: trying to learn from other people's experiences. There's no formal training when it comes to parenting, so I just go along asking questions and reading as much as you can.

"Range: how generalists triumph in a specialized world" (David Epstein, 2019) is a great book to learn about parenting. Unfortunately not every parent will have the time to go through the 300-odd pages so here's a few nuggets of wisdom I got from it:

• Get your kid to try as many different sports and instruments as possible. Most likely she will not be the next Roger Federer or Duke Ellington, but early sampling is key (and both Federer and Ellington tried many different things before settling for tennis and piano).
• Speaking of music, those children identified as exceptional by the school are those who distribute their effort more evenly across three instruments. Don't force kids into playing just one thing from day one.
• After a sampling period with some lessons and a breath of instruments and activities, follow by a narrowing of focus, increased structure and an explosion in practice volume.
• The most effective learning looks inefficient, it looks like falling behind. In fact, teaching kids to read a little early is not a lasting advantage. Instead, teach them how to hunt for and connect contextual clues to understand what they read can be.
• Focus on open skills that scaffold later knowledge: the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models and the better they become at applying their knowledge to a situation they've never seen before. Which is the essence of creativity.
• Our greatest strength as a species is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
• The current world requires thinking that cannot fall back on previous experience; we need to be able to pick a strategy for problems we've never seen before.
• When we know the rules and answers, and they don't change over time -think Judit Polgar and chess, Tiger Woods playing golf at age 2- an argument can be made for savant-like hyperspecialized practice from day one. But those are poor models of most things humans want to learn.
• Our rapidly changing world demands conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
• Being an expert at something is not necessarily an advantage. Experience frequently breeds confidence but not skill.
• Hyperspecialization leads to routine, optimization and no surprises. However it will also lead to incremental innovation, instead of pushing for breakthrough innovation.
• "Don't give up on your dreams" implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
• A great role model of all the above is Gunpei Yokoi, who after trying piano, ballroom dancing, choir, model trains and working on cars went on to study electronics and was hired at Nintendo. He realised the barrier for mainstream videogame adoption was not the quality of the graphics but the complexity of existing play, and ended up creating the Game Boy.
• Train your kid (and yourself) to drop their beliefs. Charles Darwin kept a notebook where he noted any fact or observation that ran contrary to the theory he was working on.
• Reading outside your field is capital as that way your world becomes a bigger world and you start making new connections.
• Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren't you. Everyone progresses at a different level, so don't let anyone else make you feel behind.