The Lonely Savage

Experts in Middle-Eastern politics. Experts in relationship advice. Experts in legal matters. Experts in geology. Experts in the mating habits of the mongoose. It seems that no matter where we turn, there are experts trying to tell us how things really are. It’s no secret that I’m opposed to specialization, but let’s go a few steps further and look into the reasons being an expert isn’t something to strive for.

I’ve always been a little bit of a Jack of all trades. I would find something interesting and study it until it wasn’t interesting anymore and then move on to the next thing. Becoming an ‘expert’ in any field has never tickled my fancy; I’d much rather be good at a lot of things. Still, the world insists that we become good at a field, work 9-5 and not sway too far outside of our fields of expertise. Is this a good thing? I don’t think so, and I’ve got five good reasons why nobody should ever try to become an expert.

1. The Pareto Principle. It’s a common truism that 20% of a job will take 80% of the time. 20% of your customers will give you 80% of your income.

It’s just as true that 20% of all the knowledge available on a subject is what you need 80% of the time. It’s usually enough to learn 20% of a language to be able to manage 80% of all conversations. It’s enough to know 20% of all there is to know about Quantum Mechanics to be able to confidently assume you know more than 80% of the population of Earth on that subject.

It’s important to pick and chose what’s relevant, of course. One can begin to talk about “diminishing returns” in learning, where an hour of study doesn’t improve your knowledge nearly as much as it did initially.

In my experience, it doesn’t take much more than half a year to a year of focused studies to have the same skill set as an “expert” in any given field.

2. Busy, busy, busy! One of the largest pitfalls of being an expert is that you’re only useful when you’re in demand. The leading western authority on the mating habits of the Narwhal is probably great at what he does, but when nobody needs information about this subject, I’m sure he feels lonely, useless and incredibly bored. As some people already know, the opposite of boredom is not excitement, but rather being busy! A bored person is never busy, as even the most monotonous and dreary of tasks pushes the boredom away if it keeps you busy enough. A generalist will always have more things to do, more things to learn and more things to explore than the expert.

3. It’s inefficient! By limiting yourself to a single field of expertise, you’ll be limited by whatever progress happens in that field. If nobody else is making interesting discoveries about Sumerian culture, you don’t have anything new to learn and deepen your expertise with. However, the generalist will happily move on to the next field and study that, just to see what’s what.

4. Generalists tell specialists what to do, not the other way around. If you’re an employee of any sort, you’ve probably at some point wondered why you’re so much better at your job than your boss would be. If you’re a programmer, I’m sure you could code circles around your manager. If you’re a teacher, you’re probably loads better at teaching than the principal, and so on. The reason for this is that they don’t have to be good at those things; they’ve got you to do it for them. Instead, they’re good at understanding the big picture of what you do along with the big picture of what everybody else is doing so that they can anticipate trends, pick up on details and nuances and so on.

Specialists rarely get promoted above minor administrative roles within their field of expertise. Generalists do.

5. It’s a sure way to social isolation! Imagine if you were the world’s leading specialist in concrete tensile strength theory. Sure, you’d be very attractive on the jobs market and people would be waiting to hear your expert opinions on these things, but you’d forever be “the concrete guy”. People wouldn’t ask for your opinion on what’s happening in the Middle East – apart from maybe asking it from a perspective touching on the viability of selling concrete to Iraq. You’d never be the person that your friends turn to if they forgot the name of a character from a Charles Dickens book. You wouldn’t even be considered if a person needed help remodeling their garden.

Specializing too deeply into a particular field excludes you from other fields in the eyes of others, even though you might actually have some skills. You’ll always be “the concrete guy” to them while your neighbor – who’s held 5 different jobs in the past 3 years – becomes the go-to guy for all random questions people seem to have.

As we see, being a generalist is far more useful than being a specialist. Despite this, the companies you work for and the managers that you have during your life will all treat you like the clay that they can mold into the right size, shape and fit for their organization. You’ll usually be hard pressed to do so, but you should always try to bring in the totality of your knowledge to a workplace. In my case, for example, I brought a wide knowledge of cultures and public speaking to a standard tech support job. It made my managers understand that I would be perfect for traveling the globe and teaching our product rather than sitting in the office and answering questions.

Look around; there’s bound to be hundreds of things you could do well if you just applied yourself a little to it.