Well, that’s one line of argument in favor of being a generalist. But does it really apply to Roger Federer? True, Federer played a variety of sports; but once he figured out that tennis was his thing, he became pretty monomaniacal about it. He sampled widely (like a generalist), then focused narrowly (like a specialist). A more extreme case of this pattern is Vincent van Gogh, who pinballed from one potential career to another — pastor, teacher, bookseller — before, just a few years prior to his death at the age of 37, finally discovering his true passion in art. As Epstein tells it, van Gogh was optimizing “match quality”: the degree of fit between who he was and what he did. That meant trial and error — attaining self-knowledge by living, knowing when to quit — and a consequent delayed start. (Presumably Mozart, who had a similarly abbreviated life, was just lucky that his father optimized his match quality early on by putting him in front of a harpsichord when he was just 3.)

So Epstein gives us two distinct reasons for thinking the generalist might have an edge over the specialist: (1) Generalists are better at navigating “wicked” learning environments. (2) Generalists end up with better “match quality.” What he doesn’t seem to notice is that these two reasons imply contradictory prescriptions on how to live. If life is “wicked,” you should start off broad and stay that way. If life is about “match quality,” then you should start off broad and then go narrow when you find what hits your sweet spot. What are we to do?

Happily, “Range” offers such a wealth of thought-provoking material that you’ll probably be able to work that out for yourself. Suppose science is your calling. Then, the evidence suggests, you should strive for broadness throughout your career. Students who take an interdisciplinary array of science courses are better at thinking analogically; researchers with offbeat knowledge combinations score more “hit” papers; Nobel laureates in science are more likely than their less-recognized peers — 22 times as likely! — to have artistic pursuits outside their field.

Or suppose you aspire to be an inventor. Here specialists and generalists each have their advantages. But the really enviable type is the “polymath,” who possesses deep expertise in one or more core areas but also knows the “adjacent stuff” in dozens of other technological domains. While polymath inventors are less deep than the specialists, they tend to be even broader than the generalists. Schematically, polymaths resemble a T (broad + deep) or even a π (broad + double-deep). They’re like the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who says, “I have a lot of apps open in my brain now.”

Which leads to a caveat. Miranda is a very talented fellow; so are most of the other “high fliers” who crop up in “Range.” What worries me is that this emphasis — what social scientists call “restriction of range” — might skew Epstein’s moral just a bit.

Let’s say, as a crude approximation, that Success = talent + practice + luck. Those who are richly endowed with talent may find it easy to excel in multiple domains, to be Renaissance men and women, to be decathletes of life. (The example of Leonardo da Vinci comes to mind.) The rest of us, however, must lean heavily on the practice part of the equation. If success is what we’re aiming at, then perhaps we should seek out the “kindest” learning environment open to us and give it our all. If, on the other hand, we want to live well by sampling a smorgasbord of human goods — learning a bit of quantum mechanics, running a marathon, playing viola in an amateur string quartet, fighting for local justice — then we might be doomed to fall short of transcendent achievement.

But we can still be snobbish about it. Just declare: “I am a polymath. You are a generalist. He is a dilettante.”