Range, how to complement one of the key concepts of the next 10 years.
I’m one of those people that knows a bit about a lot of different topics, not with the depth of the experts but with the curiosity of a child that is learning a new topic.
This allows me to sit with people from different backgrounds and professions and listen to them and their ideas, getting a broad understanding not just of what they are doing but also of their hopes, stories, and aspirations.
In a world full of specialists, range will become increasingly more important, not seen as just knowing a bit of a lot of topics, but range as understanding how to create new connections between things that normally would not be related.
How? Well, range unleashes curiosity, curiosity moves us to learn things just for the sake of learning, to get to know different people, to listen carefully, and to consider new ideas. This ends up on a key concept of today's specialized world innovation.
So, how do we become closer to the range concept?
Listening
Listening with attention and curiosity is probably one of the most important skills not just for work but actually for any human interaction. Listening means not just broadly hearing what the other person is saying but dedicating your entire attention to get the idea, and what is behind the idea.
Is similar to when you are learning another language and you have a listening test, is not enough to just get the words, but you need to understand the context, the topic, and even from who this information is coming.
This will allow you to be the person that everyone goes to when they have problems or difficult situations. And this attentive listening will allow you to generate solutions (For them or you) that go beyond the traditional solutions.
For example, one common mistake in different organizations is to think that the problem is that people are burnout, tired or unmotivated, but those are consequences, and being able to listen, find and understand reasons behind will allow you to play a fundamental role in tackling these problems effectively and not just giving momentary pills to a severe migraine.
Mindmaps
At University my notebooks were always a mess. Even though, I always tried to emulate the colorful and structured notes of others while trying to understand what the professor was trying to explain during the long hours of law school (For those that study law, we know that unfortunately a lot of professors don’t give classes to provide knowledge but just to show their feathers as peacocks) I never manage.
Now, I am way more comfortable with a new method of taking notes and I do it in a way that is intentionally formulated to make me create and see connections with arrows going from one way to another, side notes, references, drawings, and analogies.
If you take your notes on a laptop I highly suggest you use a platform such as Notion or Roam.
Statistics and storytelling
This is one of the things I hope they prepare you better at high school, such an important skill later in life. You don’t need to be an expert but you need to be able to understand the basic concepts of it. In a world full of data and that is increasingly being moved and automatized by that, having some information on how the data can be turned into insights and those insights into stories is a key advantage for anyone in any field.
Networking
This is in some way awful but is a reality, most of the time it doesn’t matter how talented you are, if you are not able to create and develop a powerful network it will become increasingly difficult to get into certain spaces and advance any career or life path that you have.
There are two main ways of doing it online and offline and there are key things that you need to know to use this tool properly.
Online: Even if you like it or not Social media platforms move a lot of your life and are becoming increasingly important, there are thousands of experts on how to use these tools but if there are 3 things that I consider important, those are:
- Don't be afraid to connect:
I use to be careful with the people that I connect with on social media, it is still weird to me the idea of an online friend or that people that don’t know me, actually know what I’m doing. But at the end of the day, the idea of the range is to get and share ideas with the most diverse pool of people possible and this is something that social media facilitates a lot. So if you are interested in x or y topic and you want to get in the loop, just throw some invitations and follow people that are already in that circle, not all will accept but the ones that do will help you get the information that you need.
- Authenticity is essential:
Something that gets tiring in Social Media is that most of the time people show a fake life, all the time happy, successful, and living their best lives. There is something in the long Instagram captions and I’m humbled to announce in LinkedIn, that just gets boring and repetitive.
As the point before helps you to increase your reach, your authenticity helps you to filter, posting and sharing what you think and experience is extremely important to have maybe a smaller but more powerful network, believe me, there are people outside that think pretty much the same that you do and are just scrolling down looking for something that they can relate to.
- Consistency is important:
This is obvious, the more you put out there, the more chances you will be to find the powerful connections that will help you get new info or even get into your next quest or adventure.
Offline: This one is a bit more tricky because face-to-face interaction is more uncomfortable for most of us and we can’t hide behind the screen, but here are certain things that I consider important
- Listen first:
Everyone wants to share their stuff, and as we said before, listening is extremely important, so if you are up to network offline be prepared to listen to people, ask them questions, and find common points based on their stories.
- Get the contact:
I regret a lot of times getting to know amazing people either in a bar or work meeting and haven’t asked them for their contact info, their emails, LinkedIn, Instagrams, or whatever, is hard to keep the connection especially when you don’t live in the same place.
- Be intentional:
In these spaces, you will have limited time, so understand that you’ll not have time to meet everyone so go with one or two people in mind that you want to get to know and strive to contact them or the people around them that can introduce you later to them.
Project Management
You don’t need to be certified in project management but when you are a person with a range, that create powerful connections and can develop powerful insights and ideas, one thing that you need to have is to understand how to put those things in action either for your own, your work, or someone else. So is essential that you can understand and create at least the next concepts.
Mission and Vision (Purpose)
- Goals and Measurements
- Tasks allocation and timelines
- Cadence and Reporting
Take Away
Range is one of the most powerful advantages that you can develop in any environment but is necessary to complement it with certain skills that allow you to take your knowledge from abstract and separate bits of information to new and innovative projects.
If you want to get deeper into the concept I highly suggest you read the book Range: Why generalist triumph in a specialized world by David Epstein
