Why divergent thinkers beat geniuses in the real world | David Epstein

We can think of the world as a learning environment, and the milieu in which you have to develop some kind of skill.

 We can distinguish between two different learning environments:

• Kind learning environments
• Wicked learning environments 

In this type of learning environments, we find clear rules and patterns tend to repeat. The performed task doesn't change.

F.e. Think of chess, the grandmaster's advantage is essentially based on recognizing recurring patterns.

In wicked learning environments, we find these characteristics:

• Information might be obscured
• There are no discernible rules
• The task can change
• Even the feedback you get can be delayed and inaccurate

Most of the work we do nowadays is more toward the wicked end of the spectrum, where we can't just count on things being the same over and over or giving us perfectly accurate feedback.

For the wicked world, you want a really broad training base, what scientists call a sampling period, where you're forming conceptual frameworks and abstract ideas that you can bend to the activity as the activity itself changes.

In the 20th Century the biggest contributions came from Specialists. In the Information Age the biggest contributions started coming from Generalists.

Generalists are people who spread their work across various tech domains often taking something from one and bringing it to another area where it was seen as extraordinary.

Gunpei Yokoi didn't score well on his electronic university exams, resulting in him having to apply for a low tier job as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company: Nintendo.

One day, Nintendo's president saw him playing around with an extendable arm called the Ultra Hand, and told him "Turn that into a toy, we're going to market." And it's sort of a success.

This resulted in Nintendo's president telling Gunpei: "All right, you're going to start a game and toy operation."

Gunpei wasn't equipped to work on the cutting edge, but there was so much information available that he could take it from different domains and merge it.

As a result, he developed this philosophy which he named Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.

• Withered Technology: technology that's already well understood, easily available and, often cheap.
• Lateral Thinking: taking it from an area where everyone is used to it and merging it with something else.

This is what he used for Gameboy. Nintendo still uses this philosophy nowadays.