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Careers and Business

The Self-Employed Mindset

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If you Google the words “How to become self-employed,” you’ll find a lot of advice about quitting your job, creating a plan for your own business, and of course, a few too good to be true pyramid schemes that promise a six figure income in just half a year. Most of these blog articles and MLM pitch pages fail to recognize, however, that not having an employer is only part of what it means to be self-employed.

In fact, all that you need to become self employed is to adopt the self-employed mindset. Adopting this mindset means making the realization that you are already self-employed, that you are, as Brian Tracy says, the “CEO of your own personal service corporation.” You may sell your services temporarily to an employer in return for a paycheck, but ultimately you have the power to decide who you sell your services to, and for how long. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a soldier in the business suit brigade, or a work-at-home T-shirt wearing renegade. You always have the choice to do what you want to do.

If you wish to adopt the self-employed mindset and you’re currently selling your services full-time to a company, it’s important that you yourself these questions:

1. What do I offer my employer?

  • Do I help increase revenues, reduce costs, or ensure that operations run more smoothly?
  • Can other people at my salary level offer more value than I do now?

2. What does my employer offer me?

  • Is my ability to contribute limited by my need for a large company’s infrastructure? Do I need expensive lab equipment or access to my company’s intellectual property in order to contribute value?
  • How much am I getting paid? Are other people who contribute the same level of value getting paid more or less than I am?
  • Will the success I achieve in my current job help me toward achieving my long-term goals, or is it irrelevant?
  • Do I have autonomy at work?
  • Does my work help me grow?
  • Does my work have meaning?

3. Does what I offer my employer match what my employer offers me?

Keeping the Balance

Remember: you’re the one who chooses your employer, not the other way around. You choose to gain the skills necessary to entice an employer to pay for your services. As a seller of your services, you must decide how long and for what reasons you’re selling yourself to your employer for. You must ensure that you’re getting what you deserve from your employer. You must also ensure you’re meeting your obligations and contributing value to your company. If these two are not in balance, and you are not aware of the imbalance, you risk getting fired or squandering opportunities that you never knew existed.

When your Contribution is Inadequate
It can be difficult to admit to yourself that you’re doing your job poorly, but the fact of the matter is there is some work that we just aren’t suited to do. After all, no one would buy computer software from Heinz and no one would buy ketchup from Microsoft.

We all have unique and natural talents, and oftentimes the work our employers choose for us turns out to be a poor application of those talents.  Don’t  be ashamed of your poor performance, but admit to yourself that you are indeed performing poorly. Once you make this admission, you’ll be much more open to the options available to you.

If your work is inadequate but you believe you have the potential to improve, then by all means do so. Take time out of working hours to study and improve your skills. Spend time thinking about ways you could do your work more efficiently rather than doubling your efforts in areas that have proven to yield poor results.

If study doesn’t help, you’re probably much better off doing something else. This doesn’t mean, however, that you have to change jobs. You could, for example, negotiate with your boss to change the scope of your responsibilities so that you’ll be doing something more in line with your natural talents. Negotiations like this are often most effective when you deflect attention away from your poor performance and sell your employer on your greater potential contribution doing some other kind of work.

If there is no way you can change the scope of your responsibilities or no way that you can gain enough skill in the right amount of time, you can always look for another job.  It’s a good idea to explore opportunities at other companies the moment you realize you may not be able to make the best possible contribution in your current job. Changing your job is a big step, and should only be taken should all other avenues be exhausted (despite what headhunters may tell you). Sometimes, however, jumping ship is your best option.

Finally, if opportunities at other companies don’t seem like a good solution, it’s probably a good time to start thinking about either starting your own business or changing your career focus altogether. Both of these options entail significant risks, but risk is the price you pay for freedom. And if your contribution is inadequate, chances are you won’t be risking much.

When your Reward is Inadequate
When your employer doesn’t pay you enough for what you do, it’s important to take advantage of the situation as best you can.

First, it’s important to gauge your current market value: the salary that other employers will be willing to pay for your services. Headhunters will usually be happy to provide you with this kind of information. They’ll tell you whether other people doing your kind of work at your level of responsibility are making more money than you are. If that’s the case, they’ll do their best to arrange meetings with the other companies who are willing to offer more.

When you get down to it though, money is hardly the best possible reward for your services. You don’t have to look very far to find a significant amount of evidence that shows money doesn’t buy happiness. The general consensus seems to be is that once you’ve got the basic survival stuff like food, water, and shelter taken care of, money may elevate your happiness level a little, but not very much.

Considering this evidence, it makes sense that when it comes to work satisfaction, other factors should take precedence over money. Factors like:

  • Autonomy – The freedom to do what you want, when you want. The ability to make decisions without having to defer to someone else.
  • Growth – Doing work that helps you become a more effective person.
  • Meaning – Doing work that has personal significance to you.

To me, these factors are much more important than money when it comes to making career decisions. If I had the choice to choose between any of these and more money, money would lose every time.

Even when you think you might deserve one, stop yourself before asking for a pay raise. Why not ask for an autonomy raise, a growth raise, or a meaning raise first? See if you can leverage your boss’ high opinion of you to negotiate a situation where you have more of these three things (and maybe a little more pay on top). If not, it’s probably best that you look for a new job or start your own business. Large corporations don’t tolerate being underpaid for the goods and services they sell. Why should you?

Bringing it into Focus

Having a self-employed mindset is vital to bring clarity to your career goals. When you see yourself as the CEO of a corporation of one, your perspective is no longer limited by the rules set down by your employer, or by anyone else for that matter. You’ll be able to realistically assess your career situation and know which actions you’ll need to take in order to increase both your earning power and your happiness. Becoming self-employed is something that you really can do today.

How to Sell Ideas

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Why should you learn how to sell ideas? Can’t you just write and let the ideas sell themselves?

It’d be nice, but in most cases you can’t.

It’s not enough for ideas to spread solely based on their merits. There are countless writers, artists, university professors, and inventors who devote their whole lives to creating useful, profound, and interesting ideas. Despite all this effort,however, few of their ideas seem to catch on. So, if ideas cannot rely solely on content to survive, what else is needed?

The answer is simple: ideas are products just like anything on the supermarket shelf, and you need to sell ideas in order for them to spread.

One sales strategy that holds many similarities to the strategy of selling ideas is the multi-level-marketing (MLM) approach. Although MLM has been much maligned as a kind of scam that’s only profitable for the people on the top of the pyramid, when you’re selling your original ideas, you’re almost always starting at the top.

Ideas are bought and sold through the intangible currencies of understanding and acceptance. If you buy an idea, that is, if you understand and accept it, you’ll most likely tell your friends about it. If you’re a writer you may write about it. If you’re a singer you may sing about it. If you come to completely embrace the idea, you essentially become a sales rep for that idea, passing it on to as many people as you possibly can so that they can buy it and pass it on.

The rewards you get when you sell ideas are often intangible at first. You get credibility, authority, respect, and recognition. These intangible assets can help you increase your blog traffic, book sales, or the amount of money you can charge per word as a freelance writer. Even though the monetary rewards aren’t immediate, they will come as a result of the intangible rewards. In this way we can see how the business of selling ideas is very much a business, and it should be treated in a similar way.

In order to sell ideas effectively, you can’t just focus on content. As far as selling is concerned, the packaging can be just as important as what’s in the package. Just as a bag of potato chips needs a label to entice us and tell us what we’re going to get should we buy it, an idea needs a label as well. It needs a meme. There are many definitions for a meme, but for the purpose of labeling an idea I’ve defined it as a phrase of three words or less that can fit onto the space of a gum wrapper or roll smoothly off a cable news pundit’s tongue, yet still be true to the core of the idea.

Some of the best ideas out there are very complex and unwieldy, and as such they can be difficult to distribute from one tier to the next in the MLM pyramid. Complex ideas without a label, without some phrase that brilliantly sums it all up, are seldom passed on because of the sheer effort it would take to communicate the idea and get someone to understand it. Because of this, less people are likely to become sales reps of the idea no matter how brilliant they think the idea might be.

Ideas with a great label, on the other hand, have an amazing way of infecting the public consciousness. Consider how many laypersons with only a cursory knowledge of molecular physics might talk about string theory. The phrase “string theory” has done much to crystallize an incredibly complex idea, even to the point where many people who don’t understand it fully have become sales reps for the idea. In this way, a label can do much to help people sell ideas without them having to explain the idea from start to finish.

The memefication of an idea is also important to preserve an idea’s integrity. If, for example, you write a great article about some social phenomenon without giving it a good label, chances are that not only will the essence of your idea be corrupted telephone game style, but it’ll be difficult for people to figure out who the original author of the idea was. It’s even possible that it won’t be you who is credited for coming up with the idea, but one of your “salespeople” down the pyramid who found your idea and repackaged it for easier distribution.

In order to market and sell ideas effectively then, a writer must learn to master the principles of Idea Chain Management. Idea Chain Management is the process involved when you work to effectively package, distribute, and sell ideas. If you do it well, not only will you get your idea to more people, but more people will become sale reps of the idea.

On top of this, your idea could be picked up by someone down the line who can sell ideas better than you. One of your sales reps may write a book that makes your idea famous. Just like in the MLM scheme where the vendor makes a share of the money from the sale and kicks some of it back up the pyramid, you, as the creator of the meme or buzzword that the book was based on, will naturally get to bask in some of the publicity that the book generated. People who loved the successful book that popularized your idea will naturally want to know about you, the idea’s creator, and whatever you’ve written.

The Principles of Idea Chain Management

Mastering Idea Chain Management is essential if you want to learn how to sell ideas and how to market them, so I’ve come up with some guidelines.

The goals of Idea Chain Management are threefold:

  1. You want to get your idea to as many people as possible.
  2. You want to preserve the integrity of the idea as it gets distributed.
  3. You want to make sure that you get the credit for coming up with the idea.

The first step of Idea Chain Management is to come up with a meme or buzzword that would best sum up your idea:

  • It should be three words or less. The shorter the better. For single-word memes you can make a portmanteau by fusing two words together.
  • It should be completely original.
  • It should be faithful to your original idea.
  • It should evoke an image or emotion.
  • It should be intriguing.
  • It should be quotable.
  • It should make people want to Google it.
  • It should sum up and clarify what people are thinking about at a subconscious level.

The second step is to secure authorship of the idea.

  • Google your meme or buzzword to make sure there aren’t any incidences of it on the entire web. If there are incidences of your meme with an entirely different idea behind it, that’s OK. I did find one page on the internet that used the phrase “Idea Chain Management” but in an entirely different context.
  • Before you publish the article or book or blog entry where your meme makes its first appearance, make sure you register domain names with the meme in it. Before even writing the rough draft of the article I registered the www.ideachainmanagement.com and www.idea-chain-management.com domain names.
  • Set up Google alerts with the meme name to see how it’s spreading on the ‘net. Make sure that people are giving you credit for coming up with it.

The third step is to do your part to market and sell your meme.

  • Use your meme as often as you can. Use it whenever it applies to the topic of your writing, the subject of an email, or even to a conversation you might be having. Use it use it use it. Just like any product, the more you try to sell ideas the more they’ll be bought.
  • Keep track of your most successful memes, the most quoted and the most written about, and capitalize on the success. Write more articles that apply to topics covered by your more successful memes and less articles for the less successful ones.
  • Don’t try to memify every idea that you have, only the very good ones. Too much memefication can be a bad thing and make your writing seem gimmicky. It’ll also diminish the importance of your best memes.

Memefication is Not Easy

After trying a little memefication of my own I realized that it can be just as much work to label and package an idea as it is to come up with the idea itself. It actually took me longer to come up with the phrase “Idea Chain Management” than it did for me to write this article. I had already come up with the concept of working to sell ideas effectively by repackaging them for easier distribution, but I figured that since this whole article was about making memes and using them to sell ideas, I should come up with one of my own. I spent nearly five hours going through my thesaurus looking for good synonyms for words like “ideas” or “packaging.” I also did a million searches on an online rhyme dictionary to see if I could pull a clever pun or portmanteau out of a hat.

One thing that was incredibly helpful in coming up with the meme was discussing the idea with a friend and bouncing meme ideas back and forth. It led me to believe that meme-making, as opposed to writing, is more a social activity than a solitary one. Discussing possible memes with a friend helps you explore the same idea from two different perspectives at the same time. It can make it much easier to distill your idea and find its three-word-or-less essence.

Since the process takes quite a lot of time, save your memefication for your best work. If you have a concept that’s truly great, you may want to pull out the stops and consider implementing some Idea Chain Management. If your idea is half-baked, it probably won’t benefit much from memefication because in the end it’s the contents, not the labels, that sell ideas.

Mini-Memes

Will the concept of Idea Chain Management sell? I don’t have a clue. Just because I put the time and effort into naming the idea doesn’t mean that the idea will catch fire. I’m confident, however, that using the words “Idea Chain Management” will probably take the idea much further than just letting it sit label-less on my website and hoping someone likes it.

Although I feel the Idea Chain Management meme will do well, I doubt that it’ll become a household phrase. It simply isn’t relevant to a general audience–few memes and buzzwords are. There are always degrees of distribution. Take a look at the Wikipedia list of buzzwords and you’re bound to find a few that you’re not familiar with. Some memes and buzzwords are only destined to be mini-memes. They might not enjoy much mainstream coverage, but they can remain very active within certain interest groups.

The concept of “Learned Helplessness,” coined by Psychologist Martin Seligman, for example, is a very simple meme that sums up the idea that people aren’t born helpless, but that they learn to be helpless. This meme doesn’t enjoy much mainstream popularity, but it’s a big buzzword in the personal development community. If you’re a personal development enthusiast, it won’t take you very long for you to bump into this phrase. The more you bump into it and the more you see it in connection with Seligman and his book, Learned Optimism, the more you’ll want to read the book. This mini-meme is one of the factors that has led Seligman’s book to be one of the biggest bestsellers in the field. However, I probably would’ve gone my whole life not knowing about it if I hadn’t been interested in personal development in the first place.

Become the Main Authority

Becoming a master of Idea Chain Management can be very helpful to sell ideas. When you give a brand or trademark to your idea, you become the undisputed creator of it. Instead of being some lowly distributor somewhere in the middle of the MLM pyramid, you jump straight to the top of heap as the idea creator, and as such you’ll be looked to as the main authority behind it. If your meme spreads to a million pages on Google and you decide to write a book about the idea behind it, how long do you think it’ll take before you get your bestseller?

The Rise of the Generalist Part III: How to Thrive as a Generalist

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Many generalist resumes end up like this. But don't worry, there are ways to avoid this fate.

Just because specialists aren’t doing as well as they used to doesn’t mean that being a generalist is easy. In the corporate job market, specialists are still the ones who are picked first while generalists seemed doomed to fight each other for the  leftover scraps.

There is, however, a growing breed of generalist that doesn’t seem to need to fight for scraps, and actually does much better than most specialists do. These generalists stand out amongst the rest. They choose to acquire skills not to become experts, but to complement their other skills.  Their work is not often perfect, but often quite original. Because they aren’t confined by a single  discipline,  they  see connections between many disciplines, and can make incredible insights in the process. They know that their talents are not easily recognized from the bullet points on their resume and it doesn’t bother them. They have taken it upon themselves to aggressively market the benefits they offer to others. Finally, they possess a profound level of clarity, and know what actions to take or not to take in order to work toward their big-picture goals.

It certainly isn’t easy to become such a person, but I’ve found the following rules very helpful:

  • Learn How to Sell Yourself.
  • Combine skills to Make Something Wonderful.
  • Find Your Missing Ingredient(s).
  • Keep Your Purpose in Mind.

Learn How to Sell Yourself

Selling yourself to a potential employer is just like selling any other product. And when it comes to products, people don’t buy features, they buy benefits. Any time you sell your personal services you have to make it clear how your talents and skills can affect an employer’s bottom line. If you’re an accountant, and have 10+ years financial planning experience, the benefits of your personal features (i.e. your resume) are obvious to an employer. If a company needs a financial planner and you are a financial planner, it’s a no-brainer. As long as you don’t pick your nose in the interview, you got the job.

The benefits that generalists have to offer employers, however, are much less obvious. Job openings that require a little bit of experience in this field and a little bit of experience in that field are the exception, not the rule.

As a generalist, you can see connections between various disciplines and come up with wonderful ideas and business solutions that would be of great benefit to any employer. The problem is, most hiring managers aren’t looking for people with unconventional talents. Instead, they’re thinking about the empty slots in their organization chart that need to be filled, and they won’t have time to be open-minded about how you can benefit their company.

If you’re a generalist looking for a job. It’s important to be aware of your unique talents and abilities, the things that you can do better than anyone else. You need to know what your strengths are before you can start selling their benefits. Take tests and read books that focus on understanding your strengths (Strengthsfinder 2.0 , the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator Test , and Is Your Genius at Work? are a good start).

Once you have a good idea of the unique benefits you offer, research and seek out companies or small businesses that might need those benefits. It doesn’t matter whether they’re hiring or not. Since you have a generalist background, companies are almost never looking for someone with your profile anyway. That doesn’t mean however, that they couldn’t greatly benefit from you. It’s your job to convince them that they can.

When researching a potential employer, get to know the business from top to bottom. Get in touch with employees and managers through networking events, social media, and yes, *gasp!* cold-calling. Make it clear to everyone the unique benefits you could offer their business. If they aren’t interested in those benefits, ask them if they know someone else who might be, and get their names and numbers.

As a generalist, the value you offer is so unique that only the most open-minded employers would be willing to take you on. Because of this, it can sometimes be much easier to work for yourself. If employers can’t figure out what benefits you offer them, the most viable option for you is to sell your services directly to the marketplace. The initial risk is much higher, but the potential rewards will often exceed them.

Combine Skills to Make Something Wonderful

One of the greatest advantages a generalist has is the ability to explore and innovate. They’re able to draw connections between disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with each other on the surface. When these connections are made and acted upon something wonderful happens.

Julian Voss-Andreae, for example, was a physicist who developed a passion for art and sculpture. After finishing art school he made beautiful, thought provoking sculptures that vividly evoke scientific principles. One of his most famous sculptures is the “Quantum Man”, a sculpture that seems to disappear when you look at it from different angles:

The Quantum Man exists because of Voss-Andreae’s unique background in two very different disciplines: physics and art. The inspiration behind this sculpture was his attempt to visualize what a human being would look like as a waveform (waveforms being things you don’t learn about much in art school).

Voss-Andreae now works full-time as a sculptor, doing what he loves. You could search monster.com for years to and never find a job that requires a physics and an art degree. Voss-Andreae didn’t find that job. He created it for himself.

It’s important to be open-minded and explore as many fields as possible. There are a million things that you could be passionate about if you just took the time to acquire new skills. Not all of these new skills will be career changing, but some of them might be. The new skills you gain have the potential to complement your old ones in wonderful ways and help you make a unique and valuable contribution to others.

Find your missing ingredient(s)

Voss-Andreae may have had ideas of representing scientific concepts through sculpture when he was working in the lab, but he wouldn’t have been able to make them a reality if he hadn’t decided to get training in the arts. For him, artistic skill was the missing ingredient needed to embark on a new career.

Six months ago I decided to make an idea I had for a web application a reality. The idea for the application draws upon my knowledge of creative writing, teaching, headhunting, and, most recently, blogging. If I hadn’t had this diverse background, I most certainly wouldn’t have had the idea for this web app. And yet, I wouldn’t be able to create the web app without teaching myself how to program. I bought books, watched video tutorials, and coded coded coded until I was able to put a working prototype together. At this writing, the app seems stable, and is soon to go through testing. For this particular business venture, programming skill was my missing ingredient.

If you’re a generalist, you’ve probably had killer ideas that could only have resulted from having experience in several fields. Most of these ideas, however, are destined to become stillborn if you don’t acquire a certain skill or familiarize yourself with a certain industry. More often than not, you’ll need to acquire something you don’t currently have in order to bring your ideas to life. Explore your hidden talents, take photography classes, or even cooking classes. New skills might start out as hobbies, but they have the potential to become much more. What’s your missing ingredient?

Keep Your Purpose in Mind

You probably won’t know with 100% certainty what your missing ingredient is, but if you spend time defining your purpose, you’ll often get a pretty good idea.

Your purpose is a lifetime goal that provides you with a direction. You define your purpose by asking yourself a simple question: “How can I best leverage my natural talents to help people in a way that is most meaningful to me?” Answering this question isn’t easy, but the more you ask it the closer you get to defining just what your purpose is.

When you define your big-picture goals, it becomes clear what skills you’ll need to acquire in order to work toward them. My purpose (right now anyway) is to deliver significance and meaning to people who most need it. I’ve chosen to create a web app that I believe can do just that. This doesn’t mean, however, that I haven’t entertained pursuing other paths. I have, for example, thought of becoming a career coach. However, because I feel that the web app has the potential to deliver the most significance to the most people, I’ve chosen to study programming for now. If this venture fails, I can always study career coaching later.

When you create lifetime goals, making career choices is a simple matter. It’s not about what will look good on your resume, but rather about what career choice will enable you to take the biggest steps toward your goals. Oftentimes this means you’ll be working in several different fields, sometimes for little or no pay at all.  If you continue to reassess your goals and work to create clarity for yourself, however, there will be a point where your skills converge to help you work toward your purpose, and you’ll probably get paid well while you’re doing it.

The Generalist is Rising

Although the job market ever since the middle ages has favored specialists over generalists, this is soon to change for the following reasons:

  • Technology will enable less people to do more things, thus cheapening skill.
  • Skill is becoming less exclusive. Today, people have the opportunity to teach themselves anything.
  • Markets change. When an industry flounders, many specialists who relied on that industry will have trouble getting a job. Also, markets are bound to change faster than they do now.
  • Creativity and originality will be of much higher value than skill. Generalists who can draw upon insights from several fields and create something new will have a leg up on the specialists who are stuck refining old ideas.

Just being a generalist, of course, does not guarantee success. As a generalist you must know just how to market your skills. You must have a clearly defined purpose and acquire skills as needed in order to succeed. The generalist may fail more than the specialist will, but after the first success, all those failures are sure to be forgotten.

This concludes the three part series, The Rise of The Generalist. Be sure to check out parts I and II if you missed them. If you liked the Quantum Man, check out Julian Voss-Andreae’s website to see other fine examples of his work.

The Rise of the Generalist Part II: The Specialist’s Survival Guide

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As a specialist your job security is vulnerable to market forces and technological progress. The next big innovation will make it possible for a less skilled person to perform the same tasks as you do now. When this happens you’ll be given a choice between a pay cut or the door. If you choose the pay cut, you’ll be likely be working with (or for) people who have less skill in your area than you do.

In order to avoid this fate, you must know both the dangers of overspecialization as well as the guidelines for surviving in a world where the advantages of being a specialist are becoming increasingly less apparent.

The Dangers of Overspecialization

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a specialist, but you should be aware of the potential pitfalls of overspecialization:

  • The Law of Diminishing Returns
  • A Dead-End Career

The Law of Diminishing Returns

The amount of time you spend developing your skills is rarely proportionate to the benefits you receive from those skills. When developing your expertise in an area, it’s important to be aware of the Law of Diminishing Returns. The lion share of the benefit you get from learning something new will most likely come from the first year or two of study. After that, the benefits become much less apparent.

Take the Japanese language for example. Although there might be more than 50,000+ characters in a modern Japanese dictionary, most native speakers learn only about 2,000 of them. In fact, most foreign visitors to Japan can learn just 500 characters and will never have a problem reading menus, ingredients on food labels, signs in the subway station and even some comic books. Unless you want to go to law school in a Japanese university or read obscure Japanese novels in the original language, there isn’t much sense to learning more than those 500 most common characters. After a certain point, you have to exert a tremendous amount of effort just to gain another level of proficiency. Before you decide to do so, you better make damn sure that it’s worth your time.

When it comes to learning languages, most are content to learn just enough to communicate comfortably with native speakers. Spending years learning all that you can possibly learn about a language isn’t an efficient use of most people’s time. When it comes to job skills however, it’s surprising how many people lose sight of this bit of common sense.

A high level of skill may be something to strive for if you’re a professional artist or performer, but if you’re a web developer or a bond market analyst chances are that the only ones who’ll be able to recognize your level of expertise are a handful of people, and certainly not those who pay your salary.

Before you devote time to develop your skills past a basic level of competency, ask yourself your real motivations for doing so. Are you doing it so that you can think of yourself as a “bigger expert” than your peers, or are you doing it to increase your ability to contribute value to others? If your thirst for knowledge is motivated by personal pride rather than a desire to make a contribution, it’s likely that you’re spending more time developing your skills than you need to. If that’s the case, consider rethinking your priorities and widening your focus a bit.

A Dead-End Career

Although HR recruiting managers are always looking for specialists, for some reason there are very few specialists who make it to top management positions. In fact, most corporate professionals at the VP level and above have generalist resumes. The reason these people are chosen for the top jobs are not only due to their leadership skills, but because their generalist background gives them a more holistic vision about how business works. They’re able to see the big picture and take all angles into consideration before making a decision.

Furthermore, if you specialize in one area too much, chances are you’ll become too valuable to your company as a staff member to be promoted to management level. Your skills, in essence, will become your cage. In my years as a headhunter I’ve met plenty of specialists who’ve become trapped in the same job for 10 or even 20 years. Because their skills are so valuable at a certain level, promoting them would be out of the question.

Surviving as a Specialist

To avert the potential dangers of overspecialization, consider the following survival tips:

  • Develop your “Inner Resume”
  • Widen your focus
  • Ask yourself why you’ve decided to specialize

Develop your “Inner Resume”

Don’t limit your focus to developing marketable job skills. Make sure that you develop your “inner resume” as well. Take time to develop qualities of leadership, creativity, charisma, and integrity. Although developing these qualities don’t have an immediate impact on your career, the cumulative effect over time can be extraordinary.

Widen your focus

Develop skills in other disciplines and see how the insights you gain from learning something in a completely different field can be applied to your area of specialization. Oftentimes ideas which are old hat in one area can be the inspiration behind incredible breakthroughs in others.

Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, took advantage of his knowledge of human anatomy to paint portraits that were incredibly realistic. Indeed, many of history’s polymaths, the geniuses who were able to achieve breakthroughs in several very different fields, did so because they were able to see the connections between those fields. If you’re an expert at what you do, and you encounter a problem that you can’t solve, perhaps the answer lies not studying the obscure minutiae of your own field, but in trying your hand at something completely different.

Ask yourself why you’ve decided to specialize

Some people decide to specialize simply for the joy that comes from delving deeper and deeper into a particular area of expertise. If that’s your reason for being a specialist, then by all means, continue. If you’re specializing simply to get a better job, or because you want to make sure that you’re the best expert among experts, then it might be a good idea to reassess your priorities. You shouldn’t become a specialist just for the sake of becoming a specialist. Don’t pursue expertise. Instead, devote yourself singlemindedly to whatever ignites your passion. If you do this, expertise will naturally ensue.

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What about you? How has your level of expertise (or lack thereof) helped or hindered you in your career? Any other tips for succeeding as a specialist? Please feel free to leave a comment!

Stay tuned for Part III of this series: How To Thrive as a Generalist. You can subscribe to this blog so that you can read it as soon as I publish it. Till then!

Photo by: IK’s World Trip

The Rise of the Generalist, Part I: The Fall of the Specialist

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When it comes to your marketable job skills are you a koala or are you a crow?

Koalas are super-specialists. Over the past few million years they’ve managed to evolve the capability to eat and metabolize poisonous eucalyptus leaves. This is great for the koalas because it ensures a stable food supply. When it comes to finding lunch, koalas have very little competition. There aren’t many other animals out there who’d be able to steal from the koala’s dinner plate. They’d die if they even tried. Because there’s little competition, the koala can afford to sleep, be lazy, and eat leaves all day long. Not a bad life.

The crow, on the other hand. Is an example of the super-generalist. Crows will eat anything: fruit, meat, vegetables, worms, garbage–even small animals. Anything they can get their beak around, they’ll eat it.

Crows, generalists as they are, don’t have it as easy as the Koalas do. After all, they have to compete with all the other birds, rodents, and scavengers for a day’s sustenance. For them, day to day life is a never-ending ordeal of hunting and foraging for scraps.

Crows vs. Koalas in the Job Market

In the job market, koalas have long been favored over crows, but that’s soon to change.

Up until now, those who have invested the time to develop a highly-specialized skill set, like koalas, have managed to make pretty easy livings for themselves. Because these specialists have spent so much of their life devoted to becoming a master of a narrow niche, few can compete with their skill level in that niche. They’re the best at what they do, and can often charge very high rates for their services. Because they’ve invested so much time training themselves to become specialists, they’re able to enjoy the luxury of making more money and doing less work.

Those with a more generalized set of skills don’t seem have it so easy. Because they haven’t devoted themselves to the development of a specialized skill set, they’re forced to “forage for scraps” and fight off the competition to land one of those rare job openings that require a lower level of skill.

For the longest time, being a specialist has always seemed to be the safest career decision, but actually, it’s not as safe as you might think. As a specialist, it’s very easy to get a job when your skills are in demand, but it’s much easier to lose your job when your skills aren’t.  Just because you feel you’ve tucked yourself securely into a niche doesn’t mean you’re protected against the very real possibility that your niche will be gone tomorrow.

Market trends could make your job vanish overnight. This has already happened in the memory chip industry. Many electrical engineers whose sole specialty was the manufacturing and design of memory chips enjoyed high demand for their skills for many decades. Then, when Taiwan and Korea developed the capability to produce the same chips at a greatly reduced price, they flooded the market with their cheap chips. The memory chip companies in the States couldn’t compete and many engineers found themselves out of a job.

Unpredictable market trends are not the only job killers out there. Actually, your high-skilled job is much more likely to fall victim to another, much more powerful predator: Technology.

The number one tenet of technological progress is this: make it easier for less people to do more things. As technology progresses, it takes less and less expertise and manpower to achieve the same tasks. Seemingly secure niches that require a high level of expertise today could easily be rendered obsolete by the next big technological advance tomorrow.

Skills are getting cheaper by the minute. A task that may require a team of experts now may only require an unskilled person at a computer ten years from now. This trend is destined to continue until the advantage experts have over generalists in nearly every conceivable field will become negligible. This has already happened in the past, and now it’s happening faster than ever.

Whether you like it or not, the crows are beginning to learn how to eat eucalyptus. If you’re a koala, it might be time to adopt a more balanced diet.

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Stay tuned for Part II of this series: The Specialist’s Survival Guide.  Click here for Part II.

Special thanks to Allan Ecker of the Thingiverse Blog for his thoughts on the cheapening of skills.

Koala Picture by: Brian Giesen

Crow Picture by: Linda Tanner