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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

Guest Post: Don’t Force Your Inner Blogger

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Srinivas Rao blogs about personal development at his blog The Skool of Life. I’ve appreciated his insights both on his website and the myriad sites where he has guest blogged. Recently Srini was kind enough to post a short article here at Unready and Willing. I hope you enjoy it.

Persuasiveness, goal setting and accomplishment have always been of strong interest to me as a blogger. I rarely have any trouble coming up with ideas for blog posts and I can usually just sit down and hammer out posts with minimal effort.

Today after I came back from my afternoon surf, I was thinking about what I was going to write about and nothing came to me. I really had no idea what to write about. So, then I decided to write a post about having no idea what to write about. If you sit down at the computer and find that nothing is coming to you, then don’t write. It’s really that simple. Let’s face it: one of the things that we actually do produce through force is human excrement (i.e. crap). I know that is a really disgusting example, but the perfect analogy to showcase why force is not a useful strategy in writing.

If you are forcing your writing, it’s likely that what you are going to produce is going be crap in comparison to things you write when you are inspired. So, don’t force it. Look for inspiration and you’ll probably find it.

Photo by: Rennett Stowe

How Finding Your Genius can Open up Career Opportunities

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How can you find your genius? How can you find the one thing that you do better than other people and exploit it?

This is a common theme in the personal development world. It’s the concept that everyone has innate talents that lie at the core of their being. Once you determine those talents it’s your obligation to let them grow to their fullest potential.

The first time I was confronted with this idea was when I was listening to the Power of Clarity tapes by Brian Tracy. He instructed me to make a list of core strengths and find situations where I could develop them to their fullest extent. Dutifully, I got out a notepad and came up with the following list:

  • Writing
  • Public Speaking
  • Music
  • Learning Languages
  • Memorization
  • Research

Although I believe Brian Tracy is one of the best voices in the field of personal development, especially when it comes to developing skills as a salesperson, I felt there was something lacking when listening to his tapes. These were all things that I felt pretty confident I was good at, but writing them down didn’t provide me with any clarity. They did nothing to excite me or spark my imagination. Nothing incited me to take any real action.

Several months later, I stumbled upon the remarkable book “Is your Genius at Work?” by Dick Richards. In his book, Richards argues that everyone not only has unique talents, but there’s a core talent, a “Genius” that’s unique to every individual. According to Richards, Our “Genius” is the one thing that we do better than anyone else on the planet. It was a bold statement, but in reading the many testimonials about how people had found their Genius and how it had helped them, I felt that I should give this book a try.

The book led me through a series of exercises which forced me to reflect deeply upon those moments in my life where I excelled. It also made me take a hard look at the areas in my life where I had failed. About halfway through the book I got a very real sense that there was an underlying “theme” that pervaded my life. There was a reason I was attracted to some things, and not attracted to others. There was a reason I got into writing, and not gardening. There was a reason why I left my job in Tokyo and decided to return back to the States.

The reason for leaving was simple: there was a deep seated feeling somewhere inside me that told me my Genius was not being exploited to its full potential, and every exercise I finished, every page I turned in this remarkable book, I got closer to understanding that feeling, to understanding my Genius.

Richards helps us focus our thinking about Genius by defining it as a gerund followed by a noun. Examples of other people’s Geniuses used in the book include “Engaging the Heart,” “Charting the Course,” and “Maximizing Opportunities.” These Geniuses weren’t predefined. They weren’t determined by choosing the best Genius among a list of options but rather they were to be named by the person doing the searching. In this way, the name for each Genius is as unique as each individual. Among the hundreds of people whom he had personally helped find the names for their Geniuses, Richards says that no two were exactly alike.

As I went through the exercises, the first name for my Genius that I felt good about was “Finding Significance.” I could see the thread of Finding Significance throughout my life. Finding Significance was the main reason I felt compelled to write certain stories and not others. It explained why I was sometimes not motivated to finish a writing a story even though on the surface it seemed funny, witty or engaging. If there was no meaning, no significance, then what was the point?

Finding Significance also explained why I was probably the best researcher at our headhunting firm. I loved coming up with new methods to find business professionals and their contact information. To me, finding people who had never met a headhunter before and exposing them to the opportunities of the job market was more meaningful to me than convincing candidates to take a job which I wasn’t sure was right for them.

Finding Significance stuck with me for about five days. It felt pretty good, but there was a nagging feeling that it wasn’t quite right. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t enough to just find significance, I had to convey significance to other people. After some reflection, I was able to revise the name for my genius as “Delivering Significance.”

Finding my Genius: Four Months Later

The name stuck, and ever since then I’ve made sure that whatever opportunity I pursued, Delivering Significance was a core part of it.  Because my Genius was “delivering” and not “creating” significance, I realized that I didn’t have to come up with the mind shattering insights by myself. All I had to do was find that which was significant, and deliver that same significance to those who most needed it. If, for example, I came across an interesting idea from a science or business blog, I could see how the significant ideas in those fields could be applied to other fields (like personal development and career creation, for example). Furthermore, I’d be able to find the best way to communicate those ideas in a way that they could be understood clearly.

No More Labels

After a while, I realized that I didn’t even have to be a writer to deliver significance. Even though I had always thought of myself as a writer and was a creative writing major in university, I didn’t necessarily need to write in order to deliver significance. The medium was not as important as the message. I could be a psychiatrist, salesman, teacher, public speaker, career coach, computer programmer–I could even teach zumba classes. I could do all these things and still deliver significance.

When got an idea for a web application, I decided to learn how to create it because it seemed an effective way to deliver significance. Because I no longer imposed a label upon myself as a writer or a blogger, but as a “deliverer of significance,” I felt more open to opportunities I might have never considered before, web application development being one of them. In university, I had no interest in programming because it seemed to be the the polar opposite of writing short stories and novels. Now, because I no longer think of myself as just a writer, I decided to start learning programming to see if I liked it or not. To my surprise, I found programming to be a very rewarding experience.

Finding my genius was partly the reason why I shut down my old website full-time-writer.com. To market myself as a knowledgeable freelance writer, I wrote articles on the nuts and bolts of writing like: “How to write an outline” and, “Examples of tone in writing.” These were articles that I wrote simply to increase traffic to my website and were hardly focused on delivering significance. As a result, I didn’t enjoy writing them very much. Now, because the articles I write are 100% focused on delivering significance, I find myself enjoying writing more. Not only that, but I find myself in the flow of writing much more often.

My work these days have been a balance between writing the articles for this blog and working on the web application. Because the web application has the highest potential to make money, I’ve been spending more time programming than writing. In a way, since both of these pursuits are linked to “delivering significance,” you could say that they’re but different aspects of the same job. I’m confident that my effort in both areas will complement each other down the line.

I’ve read many personal development books that had exciting ideas that I eventually forgot about or failed to implement. As you can see, “Is Your Genius at Work?” is a rare exception. I highly recommend Dick Richard’s book for anyone who feels a need for direction in their life. It certainly has helped me. Richard’s own Genius, by the way, is “Creating Clarity,” and considering how good of a job he did to create clarity for me, I firmly believe that to be the case.

Two Conversations with Self-doubt

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Just the other day…

Self-doubt: You gotta stop working on this web application and get a real job. You have absolutely no training whatsoever in computer science. How can you possibly create a fully functioning web app?
Me: Well, I know I’m new to programming, but everyone has to start learning somewhere. I think I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of months.
Self-doubt: And your idea, it’s so…out there.  You must be mad to think it’ll actually work.
Me: I have no idea that it will, but I’ve got to try.
Self-doubt: With all the smart people out there in the world, why hasn’t anyone come up with this idea before you? They must have at some time. Because no one has succeeded in implementing an idea like yours it must mean it’s not possible.
Me: Well…it COULD be possible. Maybe those other people didn’t try hard enough.
Self-doubt: And what’s more, someone might actually succeed in creating this very same web app just before you launch it. What are you going to do then huh? You just wasted months when you could have been hunting for a job.
Me: Uh…
Self-doubt: So start sending out your damn resume!

*Short pause*

Me: Okay, I admit. You’ve done a pretty good job scaring me to death, but I can’t give up now. I have to see this through. I’ve sacrificed too much time and effort not to. Goodbye.
Self-doubt: Hey, what happened to you? I always used to win these arguments.
Me: I used to have a job then.
Self-doubt: Oh, right.

The same conversation when I had a job

Me: I’ve got a great business idea! All I need to do is to put forth a little effort, and I can get it rolling!
Self-doubt: Are you kidding? Your revenue is low this quarter. You have to be 100% focused on closing some deals or you’ll lose your job! Quit daydreaming and get back to work!
Me: Apologies sir, right away sir!

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Everyone has conversations with self-doubt. The question is, which one are you having?