http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html

Hey Tim,

By not focusing on only one thing, you constantly stimulate your creativity and increase the potential to come up with something great.

When your passion spawns many things, you are likely to combine them into something great. Just like artists who were great at one medium brought in elements from other things they were passionate about (The Beatles), or businesses who fused 2 disparate elements to create something remarkable (Apple fusing art and devices).

It’s actually easier to learn the 20% (of the 20/80) of things you’re passionate about and be able to combine them into something unique and great than focus exclusively on becoming the best at one thing (unlikely).

Scott Adams of Dilbert on how you have 2 options in life:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

“The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”

By combining multiple things you’re pretty great at–but not the best–you can create remarkable things that are uniquely you.

Awesome list Tim, inspiring to hear this, especially in this day and age. So true how we should be more like Da Vinci than a NBA star,
Oleg

You want someone to come into your company and conduct a training, you get a specialist. You want someone to tell you whether it’s really training you need or whether it’s really a new recruitment program or to fire the CEO because his affairs with underlings are causing havoc, better get a generalist; you’ll pay the specialist trainer tens or hundreds of thousands, and everyone will still be blind to the problem.

You do not want to be a specialist when your line of work is, say, selling newspaper advertising. Much, much better to be a newspaper ad specialist who ALSO knows something about, say, social networking and can make the shift when craigslist comes along.

Back to the Michael Jackson example. As I conceptualize it, there are great entertainers who fall into both categories. Their trajectory tends to be different. I’ll take the low-hanging fruit first, since the two are often compared.

Elvis – specialist: though he was certainly a genre crosser and a genre creator (even if he did so passively), he was a singer/performer who did some arrangement and writing of songs for himself to sing. Actor? The consensus is no. His philanthropy seems to have been merely personal gifting. He wasn’t a dancer. And so on.

MJ – multi-specialist really – no specialist songwriter OR singer OR dancer could accomplish those videos that made him famous.

I’ll make a comparison with another entertainer. Jerry Garcia was a specialist. Designed guitars for himself to play, yet look at the Grateful Dead movie he did some directing for. You can see, it’s a bit “off” as a film because he could not really direct. Neither Elvis nor Jerry Garica – who both made big accomplishments in their specialities – could really get through in the generalist realm.

(And I say that as a bigger fan of those two than of MJ.)

That is, for all the reasons to support generalism, it’s a mistake to dismiss specialism entirely. To be a generalist, I believe, is not to someone who takes it easy and absorbs whatever experiences and opportunities that drift by. Rather, it’s to be someone open to voracious curiosity. Someone willing to try a lot and do a lot, even if it’s out of their comfort zone or not clearly applicable to whatever else it is that they happen to be doing.

Was Michael Jackson a generalist? Is a banker or a bartender? I think those remain open for debate, despite all the evidence for both sides of the argument provided above. What remains undeniable, though, is that those who succeed either work hard, work smart, or some of both.

Tim, it seems to me, is advocating working smart. But not in a way that cheats any important endeavor of energy (whether your own or someone you’ve put to work on making that happen). What he’s not advocating is being unserious about accomplishment.

Likewise, specialists often succeed at one thing because they’re passionate enough to specialize and because they dig in deep and learn to do that thing. There are infinite stories of great surgeons who can also play the piano, hike a mountain, or spot a good wine. There are writers who could paint, speak multiple languages, and throw a good punch. And the list goes on.

Are they generalists? Yes, in the sense that their passion for living is not restrained only to that one thing they’re known for best. But you’d best believe that the one thing they did extremely well, they did often and above all those other things.

Maybe that all runs against the theories of the four-hour-work week. But I don’t think so… for reasons already mentioned above.