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You are here: Home / All blog posts / On being a generalist
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August 22, 2008 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

On being a generalist

Peg wrote an interesting post on specialization in her blog yesterday, that got me to thinking.  (I should preface this by saying that my post has very little to do with her post, which is all about specialization and artistry, except the title.)

I’m a generalist, and always have been.  It was an major source of frustration to me for many years, as people advised me (not unreasonably) to settle down and specialize in something so I could achieve excellence (and prominence) in something rather than dabbling in lots of different things.  But I’ve always had a strong attraction for the new and exciting, such that when something else new and exciting came along, I always went diving after it to explore.  Some things I left behind permanently, some just for awhile – but I have never been able to focus on one thing for more than about six months at a time.  Always I have several different, ever-changing, irons in the fire.

This is true for me career-wise, too.  I’ve done project management for nine years, but have always striven to combine it with something else interesting – and I chose project management because it allows me to touch on many different disciplines.  Some people specialize in project management in a particular industry; I’ve always found that boring.  The end result is that where most of my friends have moved into management, I’m still an individual contributor.  This bothered me a lot until I realized that I simply wasn’t interested in management.  Safe, settled things are simply not in my nature.

On the other hand, there are advantages in generalization.  I am of the firm belief that knowledge in one discipline enriches the others – sometimes only marginally, as in chocolates and textiles, sometimes closely, like dyeing and weaving.  Sometimes there are other forms of cross-pollination, like my social network for weavers, which draws on software engineering to benefit weaving.  Career-wise, having a diverse resume makes me eligible for many different positions, especially those tricky-to-fill positions that require multidisciplinary experience.

And some things intrinsically require cross-disciplinary knowledge, for which a generalist is needed.  My ability to create a social networking site for weavers more or less on my own draws from experience and knowledge in social networking, UI design, software engineering, and weaving.  I happen to have those because I am a generalist – and thus the best person for this particular job.

But debating the practical merits of being a generalist is like debating the merit of abstract mathematics.  The truth is that I’m a generalist because that’s what makes me happy, and it needs no more reason than that.

Secondarily, the fact that I love being a generalist makes me good at it.  I pick up different disciplines very quickly, and I’m quick to adapt a thought-pattern from one discipline and apply it to another.  I love to explore, and I’m loath to settle down.  My belief is that nature, and love, trumps talent: no matter how much talent you have in a field, if you don’t enjoy it you will not achieve excellence in it.  Of course loving a field does not mean you will have talent in it – there are plenty of passionate but mediocre writers, cyclists, etc. out there – but true excellence only comes when love meets talent.  And excellence, in whatever, form, is worth pursuing.

G.H. Hardy perhaps wrote it best, in his excellent book A Mathematician’s Apology:

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions.  The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it, whatever its value may be.  The first question is often very difficult, and the answer very discouraging, but most people will find the second easy enough even then.  Their answers, if they are honest, will usually take one or other of two forms…

(1) I do what I do because it is the one and only thing that I can do at all well.  I am a lawyer, or a stockbroker, or a professional cricketer, because I have some real talent for that particular job…I agree that it might be better to be a poet or mathematician, but unfortunately I have no talent for such purposes.

…

We have of course to take account of the differences in value between different activities.  I would rather be a novelist or painter than a statesman of similar rank; and there are many roads to fame which most of us would reject as actively pernicious.  Yet it is seldom that such differences of value will turn the scale in a man’s choice of a career, which will almost always be dictated by the limitations of his natural abilities.  Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better).

Hardy was course speaking with the (common) assumption that everyone should specialize and the only question was in what, but the thrust of his argument, in essence, is that it is better to do things which you do exceptionally well than to do those things which you do poorly, is basically similar to mine.  Where Hardy and I differ is in his assumption that talent is the issue and that one should follow one’s talent; I firmly believe that love is the fundamental and that one should follow one’s passion; this leads to excellence more surely than mere talent.

(This is, of course, speaking as someone who has talent in many fields – including mathematics – but who seems to excel only when passionate about that particular field.  I was passionate about – and quite successful in – mathematics for many years during school, but as soon as I ceased being interested, my ability to do it flopped.  I don’t think this is coincidence.)

The net of my argument (if there is a cohesive argument to be made) is threefold:

(1) following a path that makes you happy needs no further justification;

(2) if justification is needed, fine: following a path that makes you happy, and a discipline that you love, gives you more likelihood of success than following a talent that you don’t love;

(3) it is better to be a good generalist than a bad (and unhappy) specialist.

I suppose this is fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t get it.  I didn’t, for a very long time.

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Filed Under: All blog posts, musings

Previous post: Enlarging my sectional beam, and other stuff
Next post: Names for the weaving social network

Comments

  1. Peg in South Carolina says

    August 22, 2008 at 10:44 am

    I was a generalist for the first 67 years of my life. Except for those years when studied for my Ph.D. Those years were very very hard for this generalist! Even the library was a torment to me. I struggled not to look at the books on the next shelf which had nothing at all to do with my dissertation
    I know exactly where you are coming from and I, too, was very happy. Then about three years ago I started studying crackle. My intention was to study crackle for one year and then move on to study something else. Well, you know from my blog what happened! So, be forewarned, once a generalist does not necessarily mean forever a generalist!

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  2. Hope says

    August 22, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    In my own non-brilliant way I am exactly the same Tien. I have mused before that if picking up the basics in a new skill/discipline quickly is a talent, that’s my special talent. Unfortunately it does leave me “master of none”. Dr Peg’s comment gives me hope though :-).

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  3. Cally says

    August 25, 2008 at 5:30 am

    Like you I can pick up new things very quickly and easily – but only when my interest has been sparked. Once I’m off I can rapidly get to a 95% mastery of whatever it is, but the last 5% bores me rigid and I need a change!* I get very frustrated at the degree of specialisation expected in the world today, especially career-wise. I often find myself looking at job ads thinking: but if I already had five years experience of that then why would I want another job in it?? I have done several different things (though to me they are all related: mathematics, languages, computers, weaving…) and plan to carry on that way regardless.

    *Proportions are not statistically verified and carry no guarantee of any particular level of performance 😉

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  4. Suz says

    August 25, 2008 at 2:48 pm

    My DH husband and I were just talking about this very thing!! It’s like you read my mind. It took me 46 years to realize that being a “generalist” is a great thing; my dh however, is a “specialist”. I was brought up to believe specialization was the only way…feh!

    Thank you for so eloquently addressing the beauty of generalization!

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  5. Kujo says

    August 26, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    Interview with the author of _The Phantom Tollbooth_:

    “The secret, at least in my life, is that if you want to do something you have to do something else to get away from that and that’s the thing that turns out to be worthwhile — whatever you’re doing to escape from doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”

    http://archive.salon.com/books/int/2001/03/12/juster/

    I believe an appropriate term is “constructive flicking” — or rather, “constructive *flickering*”.

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