Specialists vs Generalists

Who fares better over the arc of a career--specialists or generalists? In some sense this question doesn't much matter because one person's successful career does not look like another person's successful career: we are all different, with different priorities, interests, skillsets, demands on our time, etc. Preferences are subjective. Some people focus on a single talent and others sample from many different fields.

We are frequently told, especially when we are in college or newly graduated, to focus on a given field. Become known for your expertise in that field, and opportunities will come your way. And, for much of human history this was probably very good advice! If your last name is Fletcher, your forebears were quite literally fletchers. They knew how to make arrows, and probably little else. But our world is much more complicated than one proscribed by nominative determinism, Usain Bolt notwithstanding.

The T-Shaped Person

There is the notion of the "T-shaped person," promulgated by management consultants and corporate recruiters. It describes a person whose knowledge is deep in a given area, but who also demonstrates an ability to work in fields adjacent to her area of expertise. She has both deep knowledge and shallow knowledge, and a graph of her knowledge would look like a T:

A T-shaped individual is a metaphor; it is used heavily by job recruiters or companies looking to hire strong employees. It is a reference to applicants possessing the most desirable skills. The vertical bar on the T-shaped person is representative of an individual's unique abilities and skills and how deep their knowledge is related to those abilities and skills. The horizontal bar represents the person's ability to use said skills and abilities to collaborate with others in different areas of expertise.

Recruiters love these kinds of applicants because they can sell the applicant to hiring managers on two bases: (1) they have the qualifications to do the job for which the applicant is being considered, and (2) she brings complementary skills to the table which will help advance the company's objectives. If you're reading this and scratching your head: consider whether you are an outlier. Most people are not T-shaped, and recruiters' and management consultants' interest in these people suggests that it is a fairly rare set of abilities.

I don't want to focus too much on the idea of being T-shaped because I'm not writing a post about either recruitment or management consultancy. But understanding the notion of being T-shaped can help us focus our attention on the question of depth vs breadth in one's career.

The Book That Changed My Mind

I had assumed that the conventional advice of focusing on one thing and becoming a known expert in it, was the way to career success. Then I happened upon a book called, appropriately, Range, by the journalist David Epstein. Its main thesis is that generalists are uniquely positioned to succeed in the modern world. More specifically, one doesn't have to have focused on one thing to become a world class talent.

In an interview with Wharton, Epstein compares Tiger Woods to Roger Federer:

I think most people have absorbed at least the gist of the Tiger Woods story. His father gave him a putter when he was six months old. He was physically precocious and dragged it around everywhere in his circular baby walker, starting imitating a swing at 10 months. By 2 years old, he was on national TV showing off his swing in front of Bob Hope. By 3, his father started to media train him. Fast forward to 21, he's the best golfer in the world. He's very focused on golf--large amounts of deliberate practice where it's like technical training.

Roger Federer, on the other hand, played a dozen different sports from skiing and skateboarding, rugby, badminton, basketball, soccer, all sorts of things. He delayed specializing. His mother was a tennis coach and refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. When his coaches tried to kick him up a level, he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends. When he first got good enough to warrant an interview from the local paper and they asked what he would buy with his first check if he ever became a pro, [they thought] he said a Mercedes. His mother was appalled and asked if he could hear the interview recording. She did, and Roger had actually said "mair CDs" in Swiss-German, which just means he wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes, so she was ok with that.

I included this extensive quote because it illustrates an important point: even if you become known for expertise in a distinct area--golf in Tiger's case, and tennis in Roger's--the path to expertise is not the same. Tiger focused nearly exclusively on golf, while Roger's interests were more varied.

An important caveat to the above: the author notes that there may be exceptions to this general observation. Chess, for example, appears to require that its specialist practitioners focus on it to the exclusion of almost everything else, from a very young age. One can reasonably infer that chess is a much more complex endeavor than either golf or tennis.

Later in the same interview, Epstein notes the need for both specialists and generalists:

[A]s eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson said, we need both frogs and birds. The frogs are down in the mud looking at the granular details of everything. The birds are up above and don't see those details, but they can see multiple frogs and can integrate work. What he said is, our problem is that we're telling everybody to be frogs and we're telling nobody to be birds. That makes us inflexible, and all of our information is coming out of context. I think we need both, but we're only telling everybody to be one, and I think that's have perverse effects in some of the areas I wrote about. When I was doing investigative reporting at ProPublica, we were seeing some of the perverse effects of specialization in medicine that I think were well-intended, but just having effects that we don't want because nobody's integrating information and looking at it in context.

Integrating Information: The Generalist's Milieu

Integrating seemingly disparate pieces of information is where the generalist shines, and where the specialist fails. We have the notion of "missing the forest for the trees": someone so focused on granular details (the trees) that he misses the bigger picture (the forest). This is the limitation of the specialist's world. Specialists are so focused on the details of their particular expertise that they often fail to see the bigger picture.

The people who can identify connections between seemingly disparate ideas fare better in a world that is increasingly complex. Consider this tweet:

The article to which he links is worth a close read, as it neatly captures the thrust of what I'm arguing here. The article is broadly about a compendium of predictions from 1980. The author of the article notes, of the predictions:

Each correspondent in this volume has their own personal definition of progress, and they are pessimistic or optimistic in direct correlation to that definition. The Catholic priest predicts the return of traditional sexual mores; the sci-fi writer has us renting asteroids; the CIA guy says the Soviets will rule the world; the dentist predicts increased use of dental lasers.

These people are all specialists, and they make predictions based on their knowledge of their specialty. But it turns out that better forecasters are those who can integrate disparate information into a coherent narrative. The venture capitalist Josh Wolfe has a great, and apt phrase for this: "directional arrows of progress".

Going back to the Wired article I quote above:

People could imagine a future for their disciplines, a future with wars, a future on Mars, or a future with laser dentistry. What no one could see was the potential of all the layers of infrastructure coming into being right around them. Think of Twitch, the video game streaming platform. How could you have predicted Twitch 40 years ago? It's a child with so many parents: It require alchemy between the internet, the AAA video game industry, specialized 3D computer chips, low-cost camera equipment, and a thousand other ancillary industry-scale things that seem obvious in hindsight.

And it is this multi-disciplinary world we presently inhabit. If we want to understand the world we're living in, and how the future will unfold, or how to perform better in our careers, it behooves us to develop generalist skillsets which allow us to integrate seemingly disparate and unrelated information into a coherent narrative about how the world actually works.