Research across education and psychology shows that scholars who pursue new skills throughout their careers sustain their creativity, remain open to innovation and recover from failure more productively.
If we were to reduce our efforts at simply boosting quantitative rankings, we might free up faculty time for activities proven to increase our openness to risk, experimentation and innovation.
David Epstein, in his book Range. Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, proposes the term “deliberate amateurs” for people in any walk of life who, beyond their primary field of specialization, pursue various kinds of knowledge and skills. These individuals purposely cultivate a beginner’s attitude, which Epstein deems crucial for avoiding mediocrity and for reaching creative triumphs.
- Scientists who have worked abroad are more likely to make a greater scientific impact than those who have not.
- Research papers with the most long-term impact are those that add unusual knowledge combinations to conventional knowledge combinations.
- From economics and ecology to Broadway musicals, those working in teams or networks with porous organizational and disciplinary boundaries have the highest chance at producing transformational work.
Based on these insights, Epstein proposes intentional de-specialization and a less discipline-driven scientific progress, similar to Arturo Casadevall’s work at Johns Hopkins University, and based on what pioneer Vannevar Bush (Science, the Endless Frontier) once famously defined as “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” Epstein explains:
The “free play” of intellects sounds horribly inefficient, just like the free play of developing soccer players who could always instead be drilling specific skills. It’s just that when someone actually takes the time to study how breakthroughs occur, or how the players who grew up to fill Germany’s 2014 World Cup winning team developed, “these players performed less organized practice … but greater proportions of playing activities.”
Following Epstein’s findings, I recommend we regularly escape the “comfort zone” of our specialty discipline. Hopefully supported by our colleagues, institutions and professional organizations, we can make the choice of once again becoming amateurs in several other fields, allowing for cross-disciplinary thinking and the ability to connect disparate and tangential ideas.
Our decision could refresh our love for learning and exploring, leading to playful, open-ended experimentation and the development of broad conceptual skills and mental flexibility. We can fuse methods from multiple disciplines rather than applying slight variations of the same paradigms to all situations throughout our career.
The affective side of such pursuits (amateur originates from Latin amare, “to love” while dilettante from Italian dilettare, “to enjoy”) offers the necessary motivation.
I imagine Epstein’s “deliberate amateurs” in pursuit of a project motivated by curiosity and pleasure rather than remuneration or more hits on the citation index. At issue would not be knowledge as a commodity, exchanged for promotion and rank, but a habit of sharing that continually renews.
It reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “natality,” that deeply human capacity for new beginnings, inherent in the act of birth, and offering individuals and societies a chance to infuse the world with unprecedented ideas and actions.
Becoming “deliberate amateurs” offers the opportunity for experiencing this capacity, a perfect approach to complex environments in which rigid specialization fails to advance viable solutions.
As a bonus, our own active practice of such freely chosen “deliberate amateurism” might help inspire in our students a love for lifetime learning and the world readiness that comes with it.
