Be A Raccoon In A World Of Pandas
Are you a specialist, or a generalist?
I’ve written a little about pursuing interests and iterating your work, each step making progress on the last without a particular well-defined endgame in mind. In a general sense, those choices are somewhat dichotomous.
You either choose to do more of the same — dive deeper into the domain you’re currently in to give you a greater depth of knowledge — or broaden from your domain to another, either tangential or markedly different, giving you a greater breadth of knowledge.
Specialism and generalism
Specialists are the former, armed with an ever-deepening knowledge of a specific subject that gives them the ability to answer questions that nobody else can. Generalists, the latter, have a wide range of interests and skills which gives them various frames through which to a view a question, without the depth of knowledge to answer it. Generalists often get derided for a lack of focus, termed a ‘jack of all trades, master of none.’ Conventional wisdom holds that it’s best to be an expert in a niche — the scarcity commands high fees and recognition amongst peers for being at the top of your field.
Paul Graham, technology/startup savant, advocates in an essay that you’re best served to make career decisions by choosing the path that will lead to wider arrays of options in the future. Basically, don’t pigeon-hole yourself by specialising in something if there’s an alternative path that keeps your options open. For instance, pursue a degree in Maths and you can specialise in Economics after, but it’s much harder to do the other way round.
Education forcing specialism
Reflecting on this, I’d agree. However, the world isn’t set up in this way. Yet. Think about it. Is our model of education, one where we force a class of students to follow the same curriculum under the same teaching style, the best thing we can do? Forcing them through an ever-narrowing funnel of specialisation and seemingly life-defining choices without the hard-won wisdom to do so?
This system is not even particularly effective at preparing students for launching a career either — apparently, only 27% of graduates end up working in a field related to their degree. I’m part of the heavier side of those scales. I did a degree in Finance only to discover the theory of finance without real-world problems to solve was, well, dry. That isn’t to say it was a waste, an understanding of finance and economics tends to come in handy in a broad range of disciplines in the business world. However, education and careers should be more like dating — keep exploring the possibilities until you find the right fit.
In nature
Looking at nature and Darwin’s theory of evolution, ‘survival of the fittest’ has been misinterpreted. At face value, it sounds like the most specialised survives and thrives. Humans have conquered the four corners of the world because we’re the most adaptable, not because we’re the strongest or fittest species.
Here in Toronto there’s a common local joke that one day a raccoon will rise up to be appointed Mayor. These canny operators thrive in urban environments that are constantly evolving . Humans design new ways to keep these craft buggers out of bins yet they always find a way to thwart the latest methods. Compare them to specialists like pandas, who are perennially endangered due to difficulties adapting to an incredibly restrictive diet and sensitivity to changing environments (albeit mostly caused by human negligence) and you can catch my drift.
Humans live in a complex, uncertain world and must constantly adapt to change in order to survive and thrive.
Innovation at the fringes and intersections
The world of work changes fast, and the pace of change is only increasing. The steady climbable corporate ladder no longer exists. The working world has moved far faster than education. As the complexity of information flows, technology and relationships grow, continually specialising and narrowing domain expertise leaves inadaptable specialists fragile.
Of course, there will always be roles and rewards for specialists, but the path is less clear than it used to be — even the most skilled surgeons are likely to be replaced by machine-learning robots over the next few decades, outperformed after decades of education and training.
Having a wide variety of skills, interests and the mental flexibility to jump into new fields not only makes you less fragile, it makes you unique. Assume for argument’s sake that there was a finite list of 100 topics a human could be interested in, and 100 skills a human could have. That’s 10,000 combinations. Add in just 100 languages and that becomes 1,000,000 combinations. The more dots you can connect together to make meaningful contributions, the more differentiated you are. Broad interests and skillsets makes you a generalist, with multiple shallow specialist areas at the intersections and overlaps between your domains. You can either curate these naturally by pursuing interests or by strategically pursuing topics that complement existing domains.
Generalists and specialists can help each other. David Epstein, author of a great book on this very topic, uses the analogy of specialists heads down, digging parallel trenches but not communicating with each other. The generalist stands up, takes a 360 view of the scene and can tell them where to dig, sharing advice from the other specialists as they go. Suddenly, armed with this new advice, the specialists are digging faster and deeper in the right direction. In the real world, this crisscrossing of domains leads to unlikely innovation.
Future-proofing
The jobs we’ll be doing in twenty years, if the world hasn’t imploded by then, haven’t been invented yet. The problems we’ll be working on either haven’t become problems yet or simply haven’t been unearthed. Technology accelerates specialist topics to mainstream adoption and democratisation. Think about how the printing press revolutionised publishing and how we consume media. The ability to publish went from being incredibly niche for those with highly specialised skills to empowering everybody to create and consume content like books and newspapers. The internet has done the same for coding — web development used to be an expensive task that required expensive specialists. Anyone with basic computer skills can now build a great looking website at little cost. This is all without considering the macro impact of globalisation in the off-shoring of both skills and tasks. Eventually, technology will come for us all, changing if not eliminating our roles as we known them, and we’ll need to adapt accordingly.
How does one optimise for thriving long-term, or merely retain relevance, in an uncertain and complex future?
Those with a learning mindset, a certain mental agility and fluid intelligence, are poised to connect the dots between different fields and filter endless information flows to make critical decisions more effectively. They’ll fuse different cultures and ideas together to create great things. They’ll thrive in a risky future with rapidly changing environments, capable of overcoming new obstacles thrown at them.
To summarise: be a raccoon.
In defence of specialists
That isn’t to say that one shouldn’t be a specialist, nor should anyone be dissuaded from pursuing specialism. The world needs both. Some of the greatest leaps forward come from those with an almost pathological obsession with things the average Josephine would call weird. Balancing the artists and the soldiers for them to collaborate and nurture ‘loonshots’ is key. Insatiable curiosity drives both, and both should be appreciated.
One is curiously probing at a number of questions from different angles, and the other is working towards a definitive answer on a hard, significant question. You often can’t solve the problem without utilising both — a generalist to find the right place to apply leverage and a specialist to apply the force. A generalist without a specialist is someone carrying useless facts around, best saved for a pub quiz.
Final thoughts
Keep looking up and around, and stay curious. Have the courage to be a beginner, again and again. The word amateur has origins of doing something for the love of it, rather than denoting a level of skill. Your ability will always lag a few years behind your interests. Keep putting in the reps. You don’t need to the best in a field — you can always consult a specialist when you get stuck.
PS: Part of the reason I’m beginning to write and publish is to get feedback on ideas, expand my thinking, improve my writing, and even meet new people. Well, that and to avoid losing 40 dollars (below). I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic and my virtual door is always open! You can find me on Twitter or email me.
Quite honestly, I’m not sure where this writing experiment will go, but if you want to follow along drop your email here and I’ll let you know when I’m sharing ideas again.