Highlights from Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

• This book gave me a lot of insight into how experts and savants developed their skills and the benefits of varied experience in navigating life and solving ill-defined/open ended problems.
• Conventionally, when I teach myself something I like to see tangible results quickly. However, short term retention is actually a very bad indicator of how much you pick up in the long term. Apparently, slow and painful learning does the best at teaching something and having that stick with you.
• I would like to improve my long term retention for things that I learn, and apparently this can be done with interleaved training. Interleaved and varied training is better than repeatedly doing the same task for long periods of time (block training). Block training you are primed to give a certain response, but with interleaved training you actually need to think about your response.