The ‘20s: The end of the specialist. Why you should be developing generalist skills.

The prevailing wisdom for success is to pick a field and stick to it, “practice makes perfect” after all. From exceptional athletes to violinists, people are advised to find a specialty.

But perhaps we have this all wrong? We have, after all, gone from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy to the creativity economy and it might be time to update conventional thinking. 

While you can develop a highly specialized skillset, highly specialized tasks are in danger of becoming automated.

David Epstein, the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “Range, Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World’ says the best path to success is to explore widely and even fail”. 

It was Malcolm Gladwell that championed the idea of working 10,000 hours to become a specialist. So, as we enter the ‘20s, why is the prevailing wisdom to be a ‘Jack of all trades’?

Epstein states, “There are two reasons, the first is, as the world becomes more specialized, specialists experts, who are still important, see a smaller and smaller portion of the whole picture. So, opportunities for generalists to synthesize information in technology, in science, in politics are greater than they have ever been before. Secondly, when we specialize too early, we miss out our what economists call our ‘match quality’, the degree of fit between your interests, your abilities and the work that you do. And that’s really important for your motivation and your productivity. You need a period of sampling, of trying different things, to maximize your match quality.”

Critically here, the idea of finding what you are good at is more than just a theoretical exercise; in essence, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory; it cannot be just imagined or studied. You really have to immerse yourself and secure the learned experience. We can’t just introspect and decide what we’re good at and what we might like. Our insight into ourselves is constrained by a roster of previous experiences. So, we learn to practice by trying things, reflecting on those things and then zig-zagging accordingly until we find a place that we alone can succeed and feel fulfilled. Through that zig-zagging people tend to become broader and more like generalists. 

Teaching narrowly specialized skills, systematically undermined students for future classes - US Airforce Academy Study

This is underscored by a number of research studies. A study at the US Airforce Academy, where students have to take three math classes in succession from randomized professors, underscores our view. The study was looking at the impact of professor quality. What the researchers found was that the way to produce the best immediate achievement, which was to teach narrowly specialized skills, systematically undermined students for future classes. 

In short, if you get good at something in the short run, you pay a price in the long run i.e. your only getting good short term performance by being highly narrow. 

Epstein reflects, “The absolute quickest way to get improvement (whether this is a cognitive skill or a physical skill (like in the sports world) is to teach what are called closed skills, re-using procedures, you teach people specialized techniques for whatever they are doing - whether they are playing football or they are solving a math problem. But, to build scaffolding where your knowledge becomes flexible, you need to teach so-called ‘making connections’ knowledge. They have to draw together broad concepts; so rather than just executing something they can match a strategy to a problem so it doesn’t matter. Therefore, if it is a math problem, a geopolitical problem or a soccer problem, one has a fundamental basis on which to layer additional skills.”

So, rather than deciding where we want to be in 20 years and marching confidently towards it, life should be a lot of trial and error, plus reflection, to optimize your individual match quality. 

Even in the case of coding, which is traditionally thought of as a narrow form of expertise, the research shows that, in the studies of millions of patents, the technological innovators that make the biggest impacts are not the ones that have drilled down the deepest but the ones that have spread their work across a huge number of different technological classifications. These are the people that can solve problems that we don’t know exist yet. 

In conclusion, sometimes the fastest way to become proficient in something undermines your long term development. While you can develop a highly specialized skillset, highly specialized tasks are in danger of becoming automated. So, if you want this flexible knowledge, you need to be able to do new things and that’s a slower form of learning where you have to learn across disciplines and build these conceptual models.