Jack of All Trades, Master of Many - The Rise of m-Shaped Professionals
· 20min · thoughts
Ever since I can remember, I have always been told to focus and work hard at a particular skill. This is just the way it was done. To try too many things at once was tantamount to spreading yourself too thin, and would lead to reduced job opportunities (as any single person specializing in that area can do any one of your interests better than you). I remember my teacher once telling me to stop dabbling in the plethora of interests I had at that time, followed by the tiresome aphorism that I would become a “jack of all trades but master of none”.
That particular saying has never made much sense to me. Not because I don’t understand it, but because I could never understand whether the original author intended it to be used in the negative context it is being referred to in contemporary speech. Years later, I would discover that the phrase I had been hearing was incomplete. In its full form, it reads “Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. Vindication? Alas not. As is often the case in life, there is nuance to this story that warrants further exploration.
The Case for the Specialist
To delve into the idea of a specialist is to delve into the history of civilization. In a social setting, and we are social animals after all, it is natural to do what you are good at. In fact, specializing and trading have been foundational to the proliferation of humanity and man-made commodities (I am including ideas as a commodity here). People doing a single thing well, over a long period of time, gain an advantage in the creation of that thing. As a society, and arguably as a species, we have benefited vastly from this trade. It is almost trivial to understand that 5 individuals trying to do 5 skills independently would struggle relative to 5 individuals each specializing in a single skill and then trading their commodity. Though the generalists may imbue a certain form of self-sufficiency that would be helpful in very particular situations, the benefits they reap will pale in comparison to the specialists.
And the difference gets more pronounced as time goes on. At a certain level of productivity, the generalist will start getting limited by time. Keeping up with advancements in all the fields, learning about new topics, and actually doing the work are all tasks the generalist will have to continue doing, while the specialist can focus on their single craft, and work on honing their process and skill to a level that would be difficult to replicate otherwise.
That’s not to say that achieving such single-minded focus is easy. In fact, developing your craft, and working on it that consistently over an extended period of time, is getting more challenging than ever due to the freedoms afforded us by modern society. In developed nations today, a person can choose from a seemingly endless possibility of vocations at any point during their career, limited only by their tenacity, skill, and a little bit of fortune. And this disregards the vast amalgamation of digital information that we call the internet, accessible in mere milliseconds in whatever medium you may choose. Our ancestors, in comparison, were often restricted to jobs dictated by social class, tradition, or the needs of the community. Access to knowledge was even more limited, restricted by the very few with the talent of being born in the right place at the right time. Concentrating on a particular craft and honing it over decades has become harder than ever, and the rare few who can do it are still in high demand.
And things do eventually get easier for our specialists. After years of working on the same problem, their context is saturated with valuable experience-based information that sometimes they don’t even realize they possess. Life becomes easier as problems that at one point seemed difficult become trivial. They are looked on as experts, leading to new opportunities to consult, speak, or otherwise disseminate their knowledge. Due to the ever-present economic laws that govern supply and demand, they also become sought after in the industry as a special resource, brought in to solve niche problems that would otherwise require significant effort to solve. And that’s not even mentioning the commensurate increase in pay.
The Generalist’s Gambit
Given all these advantages, who would venture into becoming a generalist? While some become generalists out of circumstance, being a true generalist, having the fortitude, discipline, and gumption to attempt mastering multiple fields, is an extremely challenging endeavor. Because of this challenge, it is often the ambitious that fall into the trap of generalizing. Overachieving in every subject from a young age creates an identity that they strive to live up to. But ambition alone is seldom enough. While the innate competitiveness pours gasoline on this fire, it leads to individuals who are forever chasing the heights of others in fields where they are still novices. I don’t fault them, because I can relate to this feeling. Given enough time, they could well become masters of any chosen field, but the lack of focus will keep them from attaining the pinnacle.
No, being a true generalist is hard. True generalists are driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, cultivated over a period of time, and reinforced by the reward of true understanding. Being a true generalist requires loving the process of forever being a novice, building yourself up only to start again with a blank slate. This means being okay constantly risking looking foolish in a group of your peers as you constantly wrestle with new concepts and ideas. This path demands that you struggle, get frustrated, question whether the pursuit is even worth doing, and then continue despite the difficulty. I have belabored the point, but I want to make sure you understand that the only way to be a true generalist, is to fall in love with the process of learning, and not necessarily the outcome.
While this may seem appealing to some, most may question why, given the relative struggle, would anyone want to become a generalist? When specialists learn and hone their craft, they will acquire skills and experience local to their discipline. Their creativity is derived from knowing something so well, they can break it down into first principles, and construct a solution. However, many of the biggest breakthroughs in history have come through the cross-pollination of different fields. Velcro was inspired by the way burrs cling to animal fur. The first steam engine was designed to remove water from coal mines, before eventually being used to power railroad engines. And while Galileo is often credited with inventing the telescope, he allegedly first heard about the idea from a Dutch man called Hans Lippershey, who was an expert in glassmaking focused on developing magnification devices. Amalgamation and inspiration often lead to innovation. This is the domain of the generalist.
Being knowledgeable in multiple disciplines also gives the generalist a higher degree of confidence when discussing subjects they don’t completely understand. While they may not be a virtuoso, they will be adept enough to point out flaws and discuss ideas with experts in a variety of settings. This confidence provides access to a wider range of opportunities, as generalists will often have mastered the art of learning quickly. The broad base of knowledge can be rapidly built upon, regardless of the chosen venture. Specific jobs like management consulting also lend themselves well to generalists, due to the inherent nature of consistently getting placed in unfamiliar situations, and having to provide genuine insight (or at least this is what should happen when consulting is done well).
The Dabbler’s Trap: A Cautionary Tale
When I first tell people the advantages of being a generalist, I can see a glint in their eyes. Being a generalist sounds like fun. You can work on so many different things, impact all these different industries, and have seemingly endless career opportunities. Herein lies the trap. While being a generalist does provide some of these benefits, being a dabbler does not. And all too often, this is where I see aspiring generalists ending up. Passively learning about a particular topic forms a silhouette of understanding, often nefarious in the way it gives the illusion of mastery where none exists. Having a surface level understanding of multiple concepts leads to a disregard of the second order effects that are a consequence of seemingly logical, but ultimately naïve, strategies that may seem rational at face value. A fascinating example of this can be seen in medical technology investing, and regulatory affairs.
In the United States, medical devices need to traverse an often byzantine process of proving their safety and efficacy to the FDA, before their manufacturer is permitted to market them to the broader public. This process is both time consuming and expensive, and the risk brought about by the binary nature of the result, imperils any venture investment. In what may seem like a rational strategy, well-meaning generalist investors will advise startups to take the bare-minimum approach. Do just what you need to in order to get FDA clearance, and nothing more. This will both be faster, and more cost-effective, minimizing the downside if anything goes wrong. However, the most time consuming part of obtaining clearance is the review process, and often a large amount of the cost and effort are borne by the back and forth companies have to do with the FDA to provide more information on testing, or evidence of efficacy. A specialized investor will understand that for a minor increase in cost, companies would be served better collecting extra data after submission, and ensuring proper time is spent in completing the necessary components of the submission to an adequate quality. This effort up front provides an outsized return for the company in the long term, though this would be difficult to see unless you were more specialized or experienced in the FDA regulatory process.
A New Renaissance: The M-Shaped Individual
This leaves us in an interesting position. While being a generalist provides competence and creativity across multiple unrelated fields, being a specialist provides the opportunity to deeply understand a particular topic, and provide insights that only come from having wrestled with a particular topic for an extended period of time. We want to enjoy the best of both worlds. So far, conventional wisdom has advocated for developing what is known as a “T”-shaped professional profile. This translates to being a generalist where you can (the top of the “T”), but focusing on a core competency of your choosing to become a specialist in (the vertical line).
I still believe this is a good strategy, but I also want to stress that the world, and the way we do work, is changing. With new technologies coming out, learning new skills is becoming easier than ever. With more boilerplate level tasks being solved by AI, humans will be expected to have a more thorough understanding of components outside their core competency in the end-to-end process. Humans are going to become more productive, and projects are going to be completed with teams that are increasingly lean.
With this in mind, I propose we start shifting our aspirations to working on becoming what I call an m-shaped individual. Have a baseline knowledge of a wide range of topics, but specialize in multiple disciplines. Leverage the new advances in technology to learn quickly, and make use of available resources like mentors and experts in your field. Once you understand the process of learning, you will be surprised at how quickly you can learn things. This will take time, and the progress will be both continuous and incremental, but at a certain point you will become a generalist with core competencies that has the ability to identify problems across multiple domains, make creative connections, and provide deep, insightful feedback in the areas you truly care about.
Though the current accelerating pace of technology has ushered in a sense of fear, I believe that the coming few years could usher in a new renaissance period. People will be able to learn, build, and work on things that actually interest them, and they will have the tools and expertise necessary to help them along the way. So go be a generalist, go learn what you want to learn, but remember to stick with the things you really enjoy for a longer period of time, and truly master them. Go become an m-shaped individual.