By Tim Duggan
One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from Niels Bohr. He was a Danish physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922 for his work on quantum theory.
Bohr spent years studying and experimenting with how atoms interacted with each other before he even considered himself fully knowledgeable in that area. “An expert,” he concluded, “is someone who’s made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
It’s a line I often think about whenever I’m banging my head against a proverbial wall, trying to get better at a new skill. You just have to keep going, I tell myself if you want to master something.
Deciding if you should keep your work skills broad or focus on one area is a conundrum that all workers end up facing.Credit: Michael Mucci
It’s also a quote that enlightens an age-old debate when it comes to our careers: is it better to be a generalist or a specialist at work?
A generalist is someone who can work across multiple different areas and skill sets, with some moderate levels of experience across them all. They are good at zooming out on the bigger picture to get a full view of everything that’s coming up.
A specialist is a person who’s chosen to go deep into one particular domain and learn more about it than most other people. They are best at zooming into a topic to deepen our knowledge of it.
Deciding whether to keep your work skills broad or focus on one area is a conundrum that all workers will face at some point.
At the start of our careers, almost all of us are generalists by design. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we spend our time learning about our chosen industry as a whole, either through study or on the job.
I began my career in the mailroom of an advertising agency, and I often say it was the best job I’ve ever had. Each day a stack of letters and packages would be delivered to our storeroom, and my job was to sort them into pigeonholes for each staff member, and then hand-deliver it to their offices one-by-one.
I’d spend hours walking the halls, observing who did what and how they did it, chatting with people, and just soaking up all the knowledge that I could from anyone I met. I said “yes” to every opportunity, eager to try everything at least once so I could figure out which area, if any, I wanted to double down on.
After this early period of experimentation, you usually have a choice to specialise in one field that you connect with the most. Ironically, the higher you move up in a business, the more you need to give up your specialisation to become a generalist manager who is across multiple areas at once.
So which one is better for you? Well, there are firm arguments for either side. One simple summary is that generalists are more useful, while specialists are more valuable.
David Epstein, the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, argues that it’s better to be a generalist in the long term as a broader set of skills is ultimately better for you and your ability to flex different muscles. He argues that due to a highly volatile future of work, being a generalist is the best way to protect yourself with resilience and knowledge of how to adapt.
Specialists, however, decry that the world needs more of them. If everyone is surface-level on topics, then how are we ever going to make advancements and progress? Specialists usually earn higher salaries due to their unique skills, and can use their focus to build new understandings of a subject.
Similar to the debate over whether you are a segmenter or integrator at work, just being aware of which of the two you currently are – and want to be – can help you better understand your career.
In a good workplace, both types are required: generalists rely on specialists, and specialists need generalists. That way, the two types of workers can make all their mistakes collectively and use breadth and depth to solve problems together.
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET that gives One Useful Thing Literally Every Time at timduggan.substack.com
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.