We hired not just brilliant coders but people who had real breadth within their field and across domains. I believe that one of the key reasons Microsoft took off is because we thought more broadly than other startups of that era. I spent a lot of time reading books on a wide range of topics. As a kid, I used to sneak out of my basement bedroom to do late-night coding at the University of Washington, but my passion for computers was always mixed with many other interests. My own career fits the generalist model pretty well. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.”
Instead, the world is like a game where “you can see the players on the court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. “The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis,” Epstein writes. But these are outliers, because they’re rooted in repetitive patterns and clearly defined solutions. “In a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization,” he writes, “we … need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress.”Įpstein, whom I learned about from his fantastic 2014 TED talk on sports performance, acknowledges that there are certain pursuits, like golf and classical music, where it does make sense to go all in as early as possible. The sports journalist David Epstein uses Roger’s experience as his opening example of the underappreciated benefits of delaying specialization and accumulating a breadth of different experiences. I learned this from reading a good, myth-debunking book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Even then, his parents discouraged him from taking it too seriously.
He didn’t start playing competitive tennis until he was a teenager.
He played a wide range of different sports, including skateboarding, swimming, ping pong, soccer, and badminton. Here’s the surprising part about Roger’s greatness: As a young kid, he didn’t focus on tennis and didn’t get fancy coaching or strength training. As the late novelist David Foster Wallace wrote, he is “one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.” Just before COVID-19 hit, I was paired with Roger Federer in a tournament to benefit children’s education in Africa.
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