
Hard work and specialising early is not always a recipe for success - prostoalex
https://thecorrespondent.com/337/why-hard-work-and-specialising-early-is-not-a-recipe-for-success/44615161074-4a7c370a
======
GCA10
A supporting example from another field:

Back in the days of 20th century ambitious, well-funded journalism, it was
common to see specialized writers do their boldest, most imaginative work in
their first year on the beat.

They also made some newbie mistakes, but on their good days, they saw stuff
that the old pros didn't. They asked the "obvious" questions that everyone
else had stopped asking. They ventured into areas that according to
conventional wisdom were "unimportant" or "not yet significant."

People who had been on the same beat for 10 years or more could reliably
generate solid and perhaps even admired work in their specialties. But they
worked within shrinking boundaries.

The senior editors who really earned their keep made sure that the rest of us
kept rotating into new fields every few years, so that the "wow!" factor never
left our work.

~~~
cosmodisk
I've seen so many examples,where people,who spent decades in their fields
become so cynical and 'know it all' type. This is almost universal across all
fields.Fresh minds are always a good idea.

~~~
bsder
It depends on your field. Engineering is a good counterexample.

I have seen the reverse where so many junior engineers make _soooooo_ many
mistakes that are absolutely obvious to experienced engineers. That's why we
review things.

I would also argue that programming advances so slowly for _exactly_ this
reason--we really don't respect the senior ones who know what they are doing.

In spite of what people think, programming isn't "new" anymore. A "know it
all" programmer may be someone who has seen the wheel turn 3 or 4 times at
this point. I would argue that programming hasn't really had a significant
change since modern (read: assumes infinite memory and CPU) managed runtimes
(Java, Python and Javascript).

Part of this is that the fastest way to a VC lottery winner is "social
fad"\--you want youngsters primarily because they are "plugged into the scene"
and the programming is secondary. The number of times I have seen junior
programmers try to solve the halting problem would make you weep.

~~~
raspartame
I don't disagree with this, but I do feel like there is some benefit to
movement within different niches of engineering. I've been on teams where
someone who, while being an experienced engineer, was new to the stack or
hadn't worked on a project like ours, and they brought new ideas/technologies
to the table simply because they were so excited to look for them—i.e. the
"Wow!" factor of stepping into a new space. To agree with you, however, I've
only ever seen this among engineers who had a strong general base. I've
personally been the junior who tried to solve the halting problem :)

~~~
bsder
> I've personally been the junior who tried to solve the halting problem :)

I think we _all_ have at some point. :)

Those of us who had some experienced people around simply found out sooner
rather than later.

------
leto_ii
To me the real tension seems to be between individual interests and societal
pressure. I suspect most people, if left completely free, would end up
undertaking quite a wide range of endeavors and might not even end up
specializing at all. There is however great societal pressure to find a niche
(ideally as narrow as possible) and occupy it exclusively. That's what's "best
for the economy", however stifling for individual human development.

This is not to say that there aren't people out there more than happy to have
a deep specialization. That's perfectly fine as long as it's done as a free
individual choice and not as some parental/scholastic imposition.

~~~
djrobstep
I've observed more of the opposite pressure - people without commercial
pressures want to focus on their particular interests, but instead are
constantly pressured to generalize and monetize.

~~~
leto_ii
Interesting. Could you give a bit more details?

~~~
Viliam1234
As a software developer I would love to focus on understanding technology
thoroughly. Actually, just a small subset of "technology", because there are
so many tools that will be gone in five years anyway. I would rather focus on
the, uhm, less ephemeral aspects of technology.

However, the pressure at workplace is exactly in the opposite direction.
First, one should become a "full stack developer", because why hire two or
three experts when we can have one person do everything. Then one needs to
become a "dev ops", so that we don't have to hire a system administrator
either. Afterwards, one is pushed to also do some management, customer
support, etc.

I suppose the ultimate dream is a company consisting of only two kinds of
people: the boss, and the infinitely replaceable all-knowing employees.
Generalists are popular, because you can always fire one and distribute his
former workload among the remaining ones.

------
ghaff
As a former IT industry analyst who tended towards being a generalist--and has
a somewhat similar role today--there's a tension that I've often discussed
with people.

On the one hand, my personal preferences just tend to being more generalist.
And I think that can inform opinions and understanding whereas extreme
specialists can often have such blinders that they really miss broader
context.

On the other hand, go too broad and you know a little bit about a lot of
different things. And you really have very little background in any individual
area to, for example, push back against BS claims.

~~~
saeranv
On the other hand, a generalist is in the best position to understand where it
is most beneficial to go deep. Even just the exercise of thinking through your
domain, and trying to identify where you should best allocate your resources
is useful.

I'm in a profession now where full 100% of the founders of successful start-
ups in this domain started off in a different industry. It's kind of
astonishing that none of the experts in the field have been able to leverage
their knowledge to start a successful company, they just act as consultants.

~~~
ghaff
I don't really disagree. Tech types tend to dismiss outsiders who don't have
specialized knowledge in a particular area.

That said, in many contexts, no one can have a useful perspective on
everything. Yes, a Lou Gerstner can come into IBM and be successful. But, if
we're talking beyond high level management, you probably need some domain-
specific expertise.

------
cosmodisk
Mixed feelings on this one.On one side, if you want to become really good at
something,I think those 10k hours are quite accurate.The problem is, our
society runs on the basis that there's 0.1-1% of people that are extremely
good at something and the rest are just average. I'm 34 and I did some crazy
variety of jobs: construction, plumbing, advertising, translation, project
management, operations management, development.Did I become really good at any
of it? No,but I was good enough to be able to do those jobs. I'm getting
better at programming, however it'd take another 5 years or so before I could
say I'm really great at it. Such a variety of jobs and industries gave me a
very interesting perspective to business which I would have never had if I
only had one job,no matter which one.

~~~
lethologica
I’m in a very similar boat. I’ve served in the military, been a tiler, been a
developer, worked in customer service, been in finance for a large bank been a
student many times over. There have been many times though where a general
practice/skill/thought process from one industry has solved a problem in
another.

I’m a similar age to you and at one point I had considered myself a “jack of
all trades, master of none” and that really bugged me. But now I’m glad for
it. I find my thinking doesn’t get too tunnel visioned because of it. It also
took a while to shake the stigma of not “specializing” enough.

I ran across a quite a while back though that really struck a cord with me:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a
hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a
wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act
alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization
is for insects.”

~~~
cosmodisk
I quite like that phrase tbh! The thing is that I've met some people in my
life who only did office jobs and they know nothing if it's not on a computer.
People don't know how to put a nail in a wall or how to assemble a simple IKEA
shelve. They get so surprised when you tell them some basic stuff that you'd
think anyone should know at their age. Sometimes it gets so bad that you can't
find words to describe it.

------
shoo
> In hostile learning environments without repetitive patterns, mastery is
> much harder to achieve. The feedback loop is insidious. Unlike chess,
> experience does not necessarily make you better. You may stick with the
> wrong approach because you’re convinced it’s the right one.

If you find the idea of "friendly learning environment" vs "hostile learning
environment" interesting, consider reading Leslie Valiant's book "Probably
Approximately Correct" \-- a discussion of what is learnable in the natural
world

------
hinkley
Does everyone do this, or is it a particularly American conceit to look for
simple solutions to complex problems?

'Recipe' is a misleading metaphor that invites trouble. Preparation and
perseverance are great _ingredients_.

You can't make an instruction book for success. Heck, we have all succeeded in
spite of ourselves at some point, so there isn't even a sure-fire instruction
set for failure either.

You do things to improve your odds, or mitigate possible disasters, and you
hope. But if you didn't even try, then what are you complaining about?

~~~
esun
Well right here I see a simplistic reduction of a complex country and people.

Perhaps it's just a human tendency :-)

------
deltron3030
My impression is that specialist is just used as a label for imperative
knowledge (process knowledge of how to do something), and generalist a label
for process selection and management, declarative knowledge essentially.

What's ignored are cascades of knowledge, where specializing in the right
thing can make you an expert in an adjacent task with very little effort,
where the barrier might be just different labels or terminology. So you can
become both a potential specialist and generalist by chosing the right thing
to specialize in.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Agreed.

The best leaders have to be experts at everything. It requires a
specialization in generalization, to understand not just your own role but
every role in an organization.

------
crocal
Not only that. Hard work and early specialising is a recipe for depression. I
have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over again.

~~~
johnsimer
Care to share any anecdotes?

~~~
Spooky23
Talk to 10 doctors. You'll likely find that the majority are depressed,
abusing alcohol, abusing drugs, or all of the above.

~~~
adamnemecek
Doctors don't specialize early. In fact, they specialize late.

------
baron816
I’m reading the book right now.

I see people here are having the same misconception about his message that I
did before starting it. It’s not “don’t specialize in your career.” It’s more
like “don’t specialize in your life.” Good generalists will still specialize,
they just do it later after they’ve explored other things.

The “generalists” he’s talking about are people who can think creatively and
apply their learnings to different subjects. They can adapt to changes
quickly, or even come up with innovations themselves.

“Specialists” are perhaps those that just memorize the formula or are able to
identify the same patterns. When outside of the contexts they’re familiar
with, they’re not able to do very well. Thus, innovation and changes, even in
their field, can be very difficult to cope with.

Essentially what I think he’s advocating for is a liberal arts education
instead of a highly focused and specialized. The current state of liberal arts
education could still use some updating too, but a highly specialized
education that may pay off well in the short term doesn’t seem to help people
thrive throughout life.

------
mindvirus
I feel like specialization is a loaded term, as a way to label a category of
work. I've changed stacks numerous times, so I can't say I'm an expert in any
one language, stack or business. However, I have skills that feel like are
specialization: I'm good at working with multiple stakeholders across the
business, debugging unfamiliar systems, and modelling business domains and
turning that into maintainable software that multiple people and teams can
work on. To me that feels like specialization - I'd be a fish out of water
building mobile apps or machine learning models for example - but I suspect
most people would call me a generalist.

~~~
mntmoss
I think the tendency of generalists is to specialize into a kind of faith in
abstract principles, processes and structures that cross domains.

As kids, we mostly learn "do what we're told" because it becomes clear early
on that the adults know a lot more than we do. And so by the late teens we are
in some degree specialised into the ideals of the previous generation. And
then we go out into the world and have to adapt. And that's a space where the
specific advices we were given start failing spectacularly, but not for
everyone all the time.

In this light, generalists have the quality of survivors: Facing some
adversity to any particular pursuit, they aimed to lower their overall risk.

~~~
oceanghost
Hi, I am a generalist. I think you're right, but for me, it's not a strategy,
it's how I think. My brain is really bad at remembering facts, and really good
at seeing patterns and modeling systems.

There's a big divide between people who think "facts" are knowledge and people
who think understanding models and systems are knowledge. Our culture
fetishizes facts as "knowledge" when most often, what's important is knowing
how and why something works. Probably the most effective people who are great
at doing both.

Neal Stephenson perhaps said it best:

“Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the
lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is
that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they
are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent
people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that
intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or
even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become
suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.” ― Neal Stephenson, The
Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

------
Spooky23
Today, it is very risky unless you pivot out of the engineering part of your
job. Companies are investing in output, not people today. Old school companies
invested more in the people side back in the olden times.

A friend of mine from high school is a brilliant person and a very successful
manufacturing/process engineer in a specific semiconductor manufacturing
process. Whatever it was, industry moved away from it, and he found himself
completely unemployable, and at an age where he couldn't get hired as a
junior, even at a 50-75% compensation reduction.

He's doing great now, selling real estate and insurance.

~~~
ghaff
Specializing yourself out of a job is certainly something you need to be aware
of. There wasn't a lot of demand for Y2K experts in 2002.

I also remember hanging out in a tradeshow booth in the 90s with a consultant
who may have been the world expert in performance of a specific, by then
legacy, computer architecture. Or someone else who had the inside track and
wrote about a company that got acquired and dismantled.

A narrow uber-expertise is fine. But it can become yesterday's news. To be
sure, it can also be a legacy in-demand skill but there's no guarantee.

------
shartshooter
Both of my parents I really consider _generally_ smart in that they knew a
little about everything.

They didn’t have fantastic memories but they could talk really about anything
with some basic knowledge.

Having inherited that skill it’s felt like a superpower compared to peers.

Not once have I been top of my class in anything but I’m running a lot of
classes.

Lessons learned one one domain very often apply in other domains, that becomes
exponential as more and more knowledge is obtained.

------
jariel
I'm not sure if the great article backs up the thesis necessarily.

Trying to be 'Tiger Woods' by specializing on Golf is probably a recipe for
disaster, but focusing on say, 'being a Doctor' from late high school can be a
good winner. As the article hints 'the rules are clear' for being a doctor.

Given the clarity of the rules, the 0% unemployment rate etc. 'Doctor' might
still be the best profession out there. Surely you can make more at an
investment bank, but many (most) do not, whereas if you're an MD you really
have to screw up not to do well if you're trying to.

~~~
Talanes
It's not really a 1:1 comparison though. The tightly controlled supply of
Medical Residencies leaves you with a higher performing pool of 'Doctors.' You
might not become wildly rich at an investment bank, but if you under-perform
while specializing as a Doctor, you just don't become a Doctor.

------
Archit3ch
> But winning is not the same as getting better.

A famous video game coach has a concept he calls _the percentage play_.

Imagine him reviewing video game footage along with the player after the game.
The player would make a successful play. The coach pauses the video and marks
a mistake.

"But it worked!"

"It worked in this case. However, it only has a 20% chance of working (due to
unreliable teammates, or the opponent making a mistake when they shouldn't).
Have you considered this alternative line, which has a 60% chance of success?
That's the percentage play."

\---

It's also a lesson about not applying NBA advice (where you can expect
reliable teammates) to your casual basketball games.

------
epx
I see myself as a generalist (a guy called me “wideband” once, found it very
descriptive). I have heard so many times that I am on the wrong, and so many
times I am the right, that I stopped worrying.

It is like the old question whether eggs are part of a healthy diet or not.

------
kovac
It's harder to specialise, takes more effort. Being a generalist is easier
specially if you are charismatic. When we try to measure a correlation between
success and specialisation, how good one is at it and its value to the economy
is an important factor.

Take software for example. There are highly specialised software that costs a
lot for a licence while general software like an office suite goes for 5 bucks
a month...

------
blablabla123
Speaking of Software, 90% of the time expert level knowledge is not necessary.
On the other hand, broad generalist knowledge is essential for many non-
trivial projects to get off the ground. I guess this observation is basically
why we have the DevOps movement. A team of people highly specialized in
different topics is cool in theory. But in practice a team doesn't work like a
brain :-)

------
stewfortier
I think a lot of people wince at the word “generalist” because, at its worst,
it’s synonymous with “somebody with no actual skillset or specialty
whatsoever.”

But I've written extensively about the generalist vs. specialist distinction
using this definition:

"A generalist is a person with a wider-than-average range of skills and a
developed sense of how to apply them to new problems."

One hard part of being a generalist is not knowing how to "train." How do you
know what to learn next and how do you measure your progress?

I've been answering that question for myself the past few months and compiled
a short handbook of the most practical mental models that I think all self-
proclaimed generalists can benefit from knowing, regardless of which domain
they work in.

If you'd like to check it out, the first 3 mental models are live here (scroll
down towards the bottom): [https://stewfortier.com/mental-models-that-
generalists-can-u...](https://stewfortier.com/mental-models-that-generalists-
can-use-to-win/)

------
xwdv
I found the pictures in this article so interesting I struggled to read it.
It’s just too bad they didn’t really tie into the topic well. One would have
been enough, but they stole the show.

~~~
Hoasi
I got the same impression. Those photographs are attention-grabbing but call
for a separate article, perhaps on photography, or sports or movement.
Besides, the shadows don't align in the same perspective since the
photographer took pictures at different times of the day to compose single
images, which is even more distracting.

You can find a link to the whole series at the end of the article if
interested in photography: [http://pellecass.com/crowded-
fields-2017-/1](http://pellecass.com/crowded-fields-2017-/1)

