In sowing their wild intellectual oats, they got a better idea of what they could do and what they wanted to do. I found the Roger pattern — not the Tiger (or Tiger Mother) pattern — in most domains I examined. My favorite example of a generalist inventor is Gunpei Yokoi, who designed the Game Boy. His philosophy, “lateral thinking with withered technology,” was predicated on dabbling in many different types of older, well-understood (or “withered”) technology, and combining them in new ways, hence the Game Boy’s thoroughly dated tech specs. I talked a bit about research on late specializers, and was struck by the reception, as if the session had been cathartic.

Source: New York Times May 24, 2019 10:49 UTC