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Fun With Affirmations! *OR* Why You Can’t Become a Space Vampire.

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In his audio series, The Psychology of Selling, Brian Tracy tells the story of a top salesman who attributed his success to just one thing: affirmations. Just before the salesman went to meet with a client he would repeat to himself: “I am the best! I am the best! I am the greatest salesperson in this industry and in this country! I am the very very best!”

As a headhunter in Tokyo, I took this story at face value. Every time before meeting a candidate or client, I would repeat the same affirmations again and again until I felt sufficiently pumped up for the meeting.

These affirmations seemed to have helped when I was in a good mood, but  when I wasn’t, the words seemed hollow, and often made me feel worse off than I had before. There was always a voice in the back of my head that said:  how can I keep fooling myself?

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in my feeling that affirmations didn’t work. According to some recent research, affirmations only work for people who believe in them in the first place. If your fundamental beliefs run contrary to what you’re affirming,  the affirmations will have no effect at all.

But don’t take my word for it, why not try it yourself? Go ahead and try this affirmation below. Don’t worry…nobody’s watching except ceiling cat.

I am a space vampire! I am an ancient undead being from the void who can swim in the vacuum of space. I thrive off the blood of unwitting space adventurers!

After saying these words a couple times, do you feel particularly bloodthirsty? Do you feel confident that you can breathe in the vacuum of space? Does your reflection seem a little less clear when you look in the mirror?

If you  said “yes” to any of these, let’s just say that I’m happy I’m typing this miles away from you with a garlic wreath around my neck.

I’m assuming that most of you didn’t feel a single bit more vampirish after saying this affirmation. The thought that you’re a space vampire is so ridiculous that saying it might make you snicker a little, but not much more than that. It’s so removed from your current perception of reality that you could never take it seriously, even if you say it a million times.

The same thing goes for positive affirmations. If you say a positive affirmation but your beliefs run contrary to it, it’ll most likely have the same effect as saying the affirmation above. If you hold the limiting belief that nobody likes you and you continue to repeat the affirmation that everyone likes you, you’ll get depressed telling yourself something that you don’t believe in.

Most of us don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have limiting beliefs. We don’t want to admit that we believe we are unimportant, that we believe we’re not good enough, that we believe that nobody likes us.  We don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have these beliefs because we know that on an intellectual level they aren’t true. We may have limiting beliefs, but we tend to deny they exist because we know they’re illogical, negative, and just plain wrong.

If we continue to deny that our limiting beliefs exist, however, they will persist. It’s important that we recognize and accept that we have these beliefs in order to get rid of them.

How can we admit to ourselves that we have limiting beliefs?  The Lefkoe Method, which is a system for eliminating limiting beliefs (say that ten times fast!), suggests using a negative affirmation.  Negative affirmations work in very much the same way that positive affirmations do; if you don’t believe in them, they have no power over you, and will feel just as empty as the space vampire affirmation.  If you feel confident that you have no limiting beliefs, then you should feel no sense of discomfort when saying any of the following affirmations aloud:

Nobody Likes Me
I’m an idiot
I’m not important
I’m not strong enough
Nothing’s worth the effort
I’ll never win a hot dog eating contest

If you felt  a sense of unease saying any of the above affirmations, that’s a sign that you’ve been harboring that particular limiting belief. You may not want to have that belief, and you may know it’s wrong on an intellectual level, but you still have it.

Although it might not feel great to know that you have the belief that nobody likes you or that nothing’s worth the effort, the good news is is that you’ve already taken the first step in overcoming the belief: admitting you have it.

It is important to remember that you created this belief, and since you had the power to create it, you most certainly have the power to let it go. Every time you have a negative thought all you have to do is remember the limiting belief that is the source of that negative thought. When you do, the thought will lose its substance.

My Personal Experience With the Lefkoe Method

When I tried out the Lefkoe Method, the limiting belief that I worked on was :  I’m not important. On an intellectual level I believed that I was important, that I could do anything, and could change the world, but after I said “I’m not important” and felt the discomfort that came from saying it, I realized that I still, at a subconscious level, believed that I wasn’t important.

I then began to see how this limiting belief had affected me in the past. Every time I wasn’t invited to a party or a client didn’t return an email I would instantly have a negative thought that sprung from this belief. Every time people celebrated my achievements I dismissed them as flattery, thinking that these people probably wanted something out of me.

I didn’t want to have these negative thoughts. I knew they were irrational, but they just kept coming to me like a reflex.

After using the method, it feels as though this belief has gone completely. When people ignore me, my explanation for why they do so is much more positive than before. Instead of thinking “That person must think I’m not important.” I now think “Maybe he/she was busy that day” or, “Maybe that’s how he/she treats everyone.” Conversely, when I receive a complement, I find that I can accept it much more easily because I know, at a deep level, that I’m important enough to receive complements. As far as my sense of self-importance is concerned, I no longer have  to force myself to try to see things in a positive light. I just do.

Now, when I say the words “I’m not important,” they seem as hollow and empty to me as “I’m Space Vampire.”  Conversely, when I say the words “I am important,” I get a little boost of positive energy because I actually believe the words. No longer do the words feel hollow.

If you have 30 minutes to spare, I highly encourage you to try out the Lefkoe Method yourself . The web page this links to turned me off at first because it asked me for my email address without giving any indication of the value I’d receive for doing so, but after reading other testimonials across the web I decided to try it out.

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised how much value they’re giving away for free. In fact, just by knowing how the method works for one limiting belief you can work to eliminate many others without buying their full program. It makes me wonder how these guys stay in business.

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?

Forget Your Weaknesses. Develop Your Strengths.

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Note: This article appeared on my old website full-time-writer.com. As it most definitely applies to the theme of this blog, I’ve re-published it. Enjoy.

The idea that we should turn our weaknesses into our strengths is a common theme in the self-help community. There are countless books and blogs that tell us to focus on the areas in our life where we could do better and work to systematically improve upon these weaknesses so that they become our strengths.

This is a good idea, but it’s a good idea that has sadly been taken to its logical extreme. Because we have limited our focus to our weaknesses, we forget to recognize our natural abilities and talents. We adopt a kind of tunnel vision, seeing our lives a as checklist of things we need to fix.

If this philosophy could be summed up in one sentence, it would be this:

Determine what you’re bad at, and become less bad at it.

This isn’t the worst philosophy in the world, and it can help you get results to a point. I know that it has certainly worked for me. One of the weaknesses that I had worked to overcome was my shyness and introversion. When I was a kid, I used to be so shy that picking up the phone to call a store about whether they had or didn’t have a particular item in stock made me nervous. Eventually, through some effort, I overcame this weakness. Not only did I not have trouble picking up the phone, but I had grown to love cold-calling. In fact, when I became a corporate recruiter, I was making an average of 80 to 100 calls a day to complete strangers. I wasn’t calling them about store inventories either, but trying to persuade them to meet me at my office to discuss an opportunity in a different company. These calls were often done in Japanese, which is my second language.

Not only did I overcome shyness, but I became a better salesman (recruiting is basically sales). In my first year my ranking out of 100 recruiters in the company was near the bottom. By reading many books on sales and the art of persuasion and applying the techniques from these books in my daily work, I grew from being a terrible recruiter to an above average recruiter. My numbers proved it. I went from near the bottom rung to number 20 or so in the rankings.

As the above two examples show, focusing on overcoming weaknesses does help, but it has its limitations. Nothing made this more clear to me when a 27-year-old rookie, who had joined a year before I did, became the top recruiter in our whole company. He had astounding numbers and less experience than the veterans who had been there for years.

That consultant had a gift. He was a born salesman. He was naturally good at what he did and the more he did it, the better he got. Because I had subscribed to the “weaknesses into strengths” paradigm, I tried to convince myself if I worked hard enough, I would be able to reach his level. Over time, the fact that I had trouble getting even close to his level was a source of real frustration for me.

Because I was hung up on the fact that this rookie had more natural talent than me, I failed to acknowledge my own unique talents, which, although they may not help me become the top recruiter at a headhunting firm, could definitely help me become a leader in other arenas.

It wasn’t until I quit my job to work for myself that my perspective started to change. As I embarked on a new career path and devoted myself to doing what I love, I suddenly realized that, despite my lack of experience, things came much easier to me. My job was no longer a daily struggle with my weaknesses. Rather, I involved myself in work that made the best use of my strengths. Gradually, I moved away from the weaknesses-to-strengths paradigm and began to follow an entirely different philosophy:

Determine what you’re good at, and get better at it.

If you focus on turning your weaknesses into strengths, you’ll achieve a level of competency, maybe even become above average, but odds are you’ll never be the best.  Being the best requires both talent and hard work. If you’re missing one of those ingredients, above average is as far as you’re going to get. If you know you don’t have talent in a certain area, stop pushing yourself in the hopes that you can manufacture it through sheer effort. Instead, focus on the areas where you do have talent, and work to develop them.  If you develop your strengths first, your weaknesses will have a tendency to take care of themselves.

One book that helped crystallize the idea of “strengths first” for me was StrengthsFinder 2.0, by Tom Rath. The book is essentially an index of the 34 strengths that you can work to develop over the course of your life. Not only are the strengths well-described, but the book also provides action steps that you can take to develop them. In order to determine which of the 34 strengths are your top five strengths, you take an online test that requires a special access code that comes with every book.

Being the personality test addict that I am, I paid my $13.47 plus shipping and handling for the book, tore open the envelope with my super-secret access code and went online to take the test. My top 5 strengths were as follows:

  • Intellection – Having a need for mental activity, whether it be solving a problem, developing ideas, or philosophical reflection.
  • Ideation – Being fascinated by ideas and new perspectives. Viewing phenomena from new and different angles.
  • Futuristic – The ability to have a clear, detailed vision of what the future might hold.
  • Connectedness – Understanding that we, all of us, are a part of something bigger. Being aware of the subtle forces and patterns which govern all things.
  • Learner – Having a love of learning.

I wasn’t particularly surprised by my results, other very good personality tests I had taken had basically informed me of my strengths (and weaknesses) in a similar way. What was different was how the StrengthsFinder book encouraged me to develop my strengths.  The book stressed that although these were my natural talents, I had to work to develop them or they would deteriorate.

Thinking back to my career as a recruiter, I realized how true that was. In the effort to eliminate my weaknesses, I had neglected many of my natural strengths, almost to the point of making them weaknesses. Because I was too busy making calls and answering emails, I gave myself little time to think things through, thus neglecting my abilities of intellection. Because I was so busy gobbling up other people’s ideas about how things should be done, I had spent little time developing my own ideas, thus neglecting my abilities of ideation. Because I didn’t allow myself see past my sales figures for the next fiscal quarter, I failed to think about the future–the long term consequences of my actions and inactions. I was so preoccupied by narrow concerns that I failed to tap into my ability to see the connections between things. Finally, because I let myself work 50 to 60 hour weeks and partied all night on the weekends to blow off steam, I spent very little time learning anything new.

I realize now that I could have worked to develop my strengths even as a recruiter, but because the job was such a mismatch for me, it made me more aware of the weaknesses I had to improve upon than the strengths I could capitalize upon. Now, because I’ve decided to work for myself I find myself gravitating toward business opportunities that take advantage of my strengths rather than making me aware of my weaknesses. It’s amazing what change in perspective can do.

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