The future belongs to generalists. Here’s how to become one. [#41]

Problem

The future belongs to generalists, not specialists. 

Here’s Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, breaking it down: 

“Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change. Yesterday’s widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn’t have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.” (Eric Schmidt, How Google Works)

The book this quote is from - How Google Works - was written in 2014. What was true for high tech back then is true for the entire world now. In the last ten years, change has accelerated exponentially, and if the past is any indicator of the future, this trend will continue. 

What you specialize in today might not be relevant tomorrow. 10 years ago, being a front-end developer was all the rage. Today, no-code builders make it possible for anyone to build a sleek website. 

So if you specialized in frontend development, you had two choices: find something new, or get so freaking good at it that you skim the top of the market. The latter is harder than the former.

Context: why being a generalist is valuable

Besides the added agility for a faster changing world, there are more good reasons to be a generalist.

[1] Higher chances of financial success

While it’s certainly true that specialist can make a great living, the majority of people who are vastly successful are generalists.

Every company CEO, every senior manager, every investor is more of a generalist than a specialist. They have some deep expertise, but they do a variety of things - often, it’s entrepreneurship and/or investing.

Elon Musk - think about him what you want - is a perfect example. He has built expertise, but applied this expertise to a variety of things. 

[2] Lateral thinking & pattern matching

Generalist are connectors, pattern-matchers. They see solutions to problems where experts cannot make any progress. As specialist, you’re often stuck inside  a narrow niche and miss the forest for the trees.While that can be valuable, true breakthrough innovation comes from the people that connect the dots. 

A great example is the platform InnoCentive (today known as Wazukocrowd). It was developed by Eli Lilly because they couldn’t figure out solutions to some of their most pressing research problems, so they simply put the problems online, and promised to pay money to anyone who would solve it.

Using the platform, a retired telecommunications engineer solved NASA’s inability to predict solar storms - a problem they had worked on for 30 years. All it took was to take a step back, and get someone with unique experience to match patterns and think laterally.

This is what generalists do. 

[3] Better leadership

In leadership having a broad perspective is essential. You don’t have to know everything in depth, but grasping the larger concepts goes a long way. I studied computer science as my minor and while I don’t code, I can have an educated conversation with developers. 

It’s hard to manage people if you have no idea what they’re doing. It’s also hard to be better at something that you do for a short period of time every week than someone who does it all the time. Having a slight understanding goes a long way, because it allows you to ask the right questions. 

The good news is: just because you’re specialized today doesn’t mean you will have to continue being specialized on something. You can still specialize on being a generalist. 

Solution: How to become a generalist

I believe the best path to excelling as generalist is to get really good at meta-skills, and to develop t-shaped expertise. 

Let’s dive in. 

[1] Meta Skills

The first part of becoming a generalist are meta skills: skills that you can use in a variety of settings. Having these will allow you to dive into any topic, learn about it fast, and quickly build expertise. 

A non-exhaustive list:

• Learning / Skill Acquisition
• Writing
• Personal Productivity
• Human Interaction, eg. Conversation, Persuasion, Negotiation
• Public Speaking
• First Principle Thinking
• Foreign Languages 
• Memory Retention
• Problem Solving 

Getting better at meta skills never stops, but it’s the foundation of the foundation. If you know how to learn really fast, how to interact with people, and articulate your thoughts, you will become proficient in any domain much faster. 

Once you’ve built your meta skills, it’s time to build further foundations - this time around in your domain of choice.

[2] Domain Foundations

At some point, you will have picked a domain. For me, that’s business. So the next step in your generalist journey is to understand the foundations of your domain. 

In business, this would be getting a broad grasp of: 

• Sales & Marketing
• Finance & Accounting
• Operations
• Product & Engineering
• HR: Interviewing, Hiring
• Managing a team

Only once you have a good grasp of the basics, the time to go deeper on a topic or two has come. 

Why not earlier? 

Business is a so called “wicked learning environment”. It’s constantly evolving and adapting, and there are no set rules. 

The opposite, a “good” learning environment, would be something like Golf or Chess. 

In the book “Range”, David Epstein compares Tiger Woods and Roger Federer - two highly successful athletes. Tiger was drilled from the day he could walk to play golf; Federer played all sorts of sports and only specialized in Tennis in his mid-teens. Which didn’t hurt his athletic prowess at all. 

Early specialization works in Golf, because the rules are strict and there is a finite set of scenarios. It doesn’t work in Tennis - or, in our analogy, in business - because there’s an infinite spectrum of possibilities.

Epstein shows several studies in the book proving that later specialization generally tends to work better for athletes, and I would argue this translates to other disciplines as well. 

With a good foundation in place, it’s now time to develop “T-Shaped” expertise, where the bar of the “T” is your foundation. Looks like this. 

[3] T-Shaped Expertise 

By the time you’ve built your foundation, you probably have found a thing or two that you find much more fun than the other stuff. That’s where you go deep and become an expert by studying the topic in-depth. Given your foundation, you will already have a head start in building that expertise. 

This, however, doesn’t mean that you specialize in one thing only - quite the opposite. You start building expertise in one discipline, but then layer other ones on top. 

Instead of trying to become part of the top 1% of one field - which is hard -, try becoming part of the top 5% of 2-3 fields that are only somewhat related. This way, you can build your unique expertise by integrating several skillsets. 

Let’s take my friend Damian. He’s also an entrepreneur with great business foundations and at some point decided to go deep on his industry expertise: manufacturing SMBs in Germany.

That dangerous combination now allows him to bootstrap a recruiting business for this specific segment (check them out here). This way, he can leverage his existing skillset while deepening his expertise in a domain where he only knows the foundations (recruiting). 

I built my career in international expansion - my day job - in a similar fashion. I’m not the best entrepreneur out there (although decent), and don’t speak the most foreign languages out there (but 5 is much better than average).

By combining the entrepreneurship skillset with my foreign language skills, doing international expansion became the perfect fit for my profile - with very little competition. 

Start by building t-shaped expertise, then slowly add more Ts - until you have a broad portfolio of deeper expertise that you can integrate uniquely. 

There’s a lot more to say on these topics; consider this an introductory newsletter. In the coming weeks, I will write more about the following topics: 

• Improving your meta skills (with a deep dive on learning and skill acquisition)
• A four-step framework to build a generalist career 
• 4 ways to integrate your interests so you can do more than one thing in your life 

Please reply to this post if you have another topic you’d like to see a deeper dive into. Always happy about reader feedback. :) 

PS: If you enjoyed this post, please show some love on LinkedIn. It helps a lot. :) 

PPS: In case you missed it, I’m launching an online course soon: Personal Productivity OS. There, I distill 10+ years of my own research, trials and errors into 17 videos, ~3 hours, and 14 actionable systems that you can implement right away. Sign up to the waitlist here, and get exclusive behind-the-scenes insights. Personal Productivity is a key meta skill on the generalist journey.