You have heard it before: “Jack of all trades, master of none”. If you aren’t an expert, we don’t need your input, thanks. Have a great life. But what does it mean to be an expert? Can you be an expert generalist? How does one define a discipline in the first place? It is a pretty tricky question.
How about this for a definition of an expert:
Someone who drills into a specific niche for long enough that they rank in the top 100 people working in that area.
I think that is a pretty strange way of measuring expertise, but I fear it is pretty close to what most people really think. It raises a few questions for me. What is an appropriate niche? What happens when a niche becomes overcrowded? Do we just subdivide it and pretend nothing happened? Oh and what if I meet someone who has a masters in biochemistry? Are they Jacks, or Masters, or what? Oh, dear.
Well, actually, it depends. What sort of market are they in?
Markets
In his book “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You“, Cal Newport discusses two distinct capital markets which workers can find themselves in. There are winner-takes-all markets and there are auction markets.
If you are in a winner-takes-all market then there is a single skill which determines how people are ranked. If you want to do well, figure out what that one skill is, and then get really good at it. Don’t worry about too much else. The example given in the book is that of the script writer. The one skill that determines success is, surprise surprise, script writing. If you write scripts better than anyone else then you are going to take a huge share of the script writing jobs. There is not much to be gained from being the second best script writer.
If you are in an auction market, by contrast, things are a bit more complicated. There is no one skill that you can master in order to outperform your peers. Rather, you will bring a unique blend of skills to the table, and so will they. To be successful in this market you need to be more flexible in your approach. The advice here is to look for “open gates of opportunity”. View your personal development in terms of skill acquisition. When an opportunity to learn something new presents itself, take it (especially if you can learn from an expert!). Each time you pass through a gate, and have levelled-up another skill, you should have a bit more leverage to go off and find the next thing that you find interesting. And so the path continues.
As someone who works in an auction market myself, I like thinking about ways that I can continue expanding my range. I think that one can find a niche in being a strong generalist, in the sense that one’s unique blend of skills might be hard to replicate. If you are interested in expanding your own skillset then here are a couple of methods that have worked for me, taken from “Range” by David Epstein.
Range
Try to think from first principles. This is the approach that physicists use when thinking about problems, and the method that Elon Musk credits for the success of SpaceX. Why is this approach so good? Basically because it helps you to think outside of your area of expertise! If you are faced with a problem that looks familiar your intuition will kick in and you will miss novel solutions. First principles thinking forces you to take a slower, more methodical, approach; no reasoning by analogy or intuition allowed.
You might also try and put down your usual set of tools. You have a new dataset to analyse and you know your trusty excel-spreadsheet-curve-fitting method will get the job done. But would you be able to handle 100 such datasets per day? And aren’t the plots that you generate a bit, well, ugly? Why not take a crack at writing a Jupyter notebook for all your analysis needs? The plots would look better and the whole process could be scripted to handle scale. Your initial goal is met and you have broadened your skills at the same time.
Regardless of what kind of market you see yourself in, both generalists and specialists have their own roles to play. But if you are a generalist, and some specialist starts in with the “Jack of all trades…” bit, you can always educate them on how the original saying continued:
Jack of all trades, master of none.
Oftentimes better than a master of one.