Stay Broad: A Salve for the Non-Specialist’s Mind

As a child, I loved to play connect-the-dots. An astrological display of points lay scattered on a page, unrelated in their current state. But starting at point 1, I drew a line to point 2.

Okay, so I have a line now.

2 to 3, a longer line.

This process continues to the last point on the page, and now it is clear: an image, completed from these seemingly unrelated marks on paper.

Connect-the-dots is analogous to a successful generalist. A generalist cannot always see where he or she is headed, but each experience and component along their path is creating something that will eventually be powerfully cohesive. My career is an example of this. I studied English/Creative Writing and Spanish in college while assuming leadership positions in my fraternity. Upon graduating, I took a management position with a transportation company, being responsible for P&L forecasting, annual budgeting, employee scheduling and discipline, and training other managers. During this time, I finished a Master’s in Business Administration. When away from work I taught myself basic programming in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Next, I was hired as an operations analyst for a software company. I went from a management role to an individual contributor, working to push forward efficiency initiatives for a two-hundred-person organization. In this role I acquired technical skills like SQL querying, JIRA administration, and Tableau dashboard creation, as well as regularly deliver presentations to our leadership team to discuss findings of my work. Currently, I am a project manager for the same company, but am in role rotation to gain a broader understanding of our products and services.

Where is my career headed? Feel free to let me know if you see the dots connecting, because I don’t yet! I say this jokingly, but truth often lies in humor — I want to be capable in many areas. I like understanding many perspectives of the same problem. And what I have found interesting is the carryover these seemingly disparate fields have with each other: the discipline needed to learn a foreign language has served me well in learning how to code. Proper grammar carries over to proper syntax. Orchestrating semi-truck drivers’ schedules to meet all the needs of a customer translates to seeing the big picture of a problem before tackling the details, a universally applicable skill. Having worked in industries where no two customers are the same has served me well as I work with dozens of customers now as a project manager.

Now, enter the specialist.

Specialization is the mark of an industrialized society. We want to be known as “subject matter experts,” don’t we? It’s a great feeling to enter a problematic situation with the heroic solution in our hands. This emphasis on specialization begins early. Parents tell their kids to pick a sport, instrument, or hobby and to stick to it. College tells students to specialize, narrow in, and focus on a degree. Then we begin our careers and companies tell employees to be experts at what we do. Specialists, like software engineers or plumbers or cardiologists, have a distinct contribution to society, so their services are readily paid for. And rightly so: they have a skillset that I do not, therefore I will pay them for work I cannot do. The specialist succeeds in maximizing this skillset, not by learning what his coworkers do; to learn something outside their specialization could even appear to be a waste of time to them, because it will not grow their success as a subject matter expert.

A paint-by-number page likens to the specialist’s pursuit. Even without color, the end goal of the paint-by-number is obvious. You can already see the dog or flower or building — the outline implies the result. As you fill it with color, it becomes more complete, but it does not change the conclusion; it will still be a dog or flower or building regardless. Our world needs people who love their niche and are incredibly gifted in one thing. Without them, we would miss out on many innovations. They know their end goal, so they put all their energy toward achieving it.

However, not all of us yet see the forthcoming painting; in other words, many people do not pursue specific long-term goals early in their careers. A goal, in its essence, takes focused and sustained effort toward something, which means saying “no” to other options.

You may have not decided on what you want the painting to look like, and that is fine. You have permission to not decide yet. I want to encourage you to be a generalist for as long as you can. A mentor once told me:

“Stay broad for as long as possible, because you’ll always have time to specialize. It’s much harder to revert back once you do.”

Honestly, I was frustrated by this sentiment. I wanted to be an expert in something. I wanted to be the go-to-guy, the one people looked to because I was the best at it. My father is a university professor, and leads his peers nationally regarding research and accolades. Until recently, I wanted to be just like him: not necessarily a professor, but a true subject matter expert. So why should I heed my mentor’s advice, when specialists clearly make money more quickly in their careers (as a general rule) and have the respect of their peers for their expertise? Beyond the basic motivation of financial gain, everyone wants to enjoy their work, and millenials in particular want to contribute to a greater purpose with those forty-plus hours each week. Some may find that niche right away, but I would argue the majority of recent graduates don’t know exactly what they want to do the moment after they toss their caps in the air. Much of life is about discovering ourselves and how we best contribute to society, and most twenty-two year olds don’t have a great handle on this — I know I did not.

Here is the wisdom of that advice: the professional who stays general in their skill set for as long as possible has an advantage over the specialist as their lane of opportunity stays wide while they figure out themselves and their role in an organization, an industry, and society. If they eventually find their “thing,” they can be assured they made the right choice, because they have already experienced several other possibilities and whittled down these options over time. Additionally, their miles logged in other positions and perspectives will give them a more holistic view on their niche, which makes them a better problem solver, thinker, and mentor. Contrast this with an employee who begins as a specialist but broadens over time; a former manager of mine — who is a senior director for a software company — told me several times, “I’m just an old engineer.” He figured out how to give speeches, create budgets, recruit, analyze data, etc. (aka., broadened his skill set) to be a more effective manager, but he remained a software engineer at heart. He approached problems with that mindset, which served him well, but he consequently practiced a very specific mode of operating: approach a problem like an engineer who knows other skills, rather than approach a problem with several skills and perhaps apply engineering principles to it. The distinction is subtle, but as my old boss exemplifies, its trickle effect endures for potentially decades of your career. Additionally, once a person chooses a specialty, he or she usually selects it because they are talented at it and are encouraged to deepen their proficiency. There are outliers like my former manager, certainly, but there are far more engineers who stay engineers because they want to be engineers than there are engineers-turned-generalists.

Specialist, can you learn something from the generalist approach? You may not want to, as it is your natural inclination to stay in your lane. But I have experienced the value of learning something in which there are more general lessons that can be applied to another field. Problem-solving, for example, is critical to whatever your specialization is, so if you learn how to problem solve in, say, a coding question, then you may gain some perspective on how to view another problem more holistically. Additionally, to learn another focus is to grow in empathy toward others; the more our view expands, the better understanding we have of others’ roles in the same initiatives as yourself.

Generalist, what can you learn from the specialist? Well, you can learn some of their specialty, which is probably what you want to do. More importantly, though, is to learn the value of focus from them. It takes significant effort and dedication to become a subject matter expert. A generalist shouldn’t “cherry pick” only what they like, but to be a true generalist, they must learn a bit from everyone, and in a way make generalization their specialty. Un-specialization is your specialty.

So for all you seemingly wayward professionals out there, including myself: keep the image of connect-the-dots in your mind. Keep learning, discovering, refining, adding, deleting, trying. Eventually you’ll see the bigger picture that one line is forming; one day, you may even add some color to the finished drawing.