In that way, the students had something in common with Luria’s remote villagers — even the science majors were typically unable to generalize researc… - David Epstein

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

The biggest myth about creativity is that it needs freedom.

It doesn’t. It needs constraints.

When options shrink, your brain stops repeating and starts searching.

The box is not limiting you. It is forcing you to think.

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly. According to Gary Marcus, a psychology and neural science professor who sold his machine learning company to Uber, “In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer. In more open-ended games, I think they certainly will. Not just games, in open ended real-world problems we’re still crushing the machines.