Thu 9 Jun 2005
Rethinking the ‘Specialist Generalist’ approach
Posted by Joe under At home and work , Random Thoughts[2] Comments
A while back I wrote about the up side of being a generalist. In fact I went as far as saying that I was a ‘Specialist Generalist’; specialising in knowing a bit about everything. Unfortunately I am falling into the generalist trap like Richard said: …because I’m a jack of all trades Generalist, too much of my time gets taken up doing menial Web things for business people – just because I can.
The end result of this is that I get bored. Which in turn creates its own problem: I become unmotivated.
The hard part is deciding what to do about it. There is no point blaming anyone other than myself for this; my situation is the result of my decisions. Nor is there any point in waiting for someone to get me out of it; the only person that can get me out of it is me.
The natural next step is to answer the following questions:
- Where do I want to be x years from now?
- What do I have to do to get there?
- What am I going to do about it?
These may sound like trivial questions, but they’re not. The first two are particularly difficult. The answer to the third should become obvious once that first two are answered. However, answering it and doing something about it are two different things.
So I’ll start with a basic question: What do I like to do? More random thoughts may follow…
Yes I can sympathise! (surprise surprise
One approach that helped me become more of a specialist – and I do think I am more of one than when I wrote the above quote – was to pick a couple of specialist topics for my blog and really focus on them. Of course for me it’s Web 2.0 and Social Media, but the thing is it’s actually helped me focus my skillset too – analysis and writing have become my ‘trade’. What a pity nobody in New Zealand has any jobs in that trade! :-0 But I’m starting to make progress, slowly, with jobs in the US and abroad – where my specialisation is becoming recognized.
So my humble advice – focus your blog on 1-2 topics and really hone your skills by writing about them.
Apologies for the long delay in writing a response to this – I’ve only just found these pearls of wisdom.
The specialist v generalist trade off is a difficult one – with risks on both sides. I’m at the “3 year into my career” stage where I need to start making some decisions.
Generalism is definitely my “comfort zone” at the moment – but I’m thinking of going more specialised – but not too far.
My suggested approach is to gradually cut down the number of “things” which I know about – i.e. to go from “knowing 10% about 10 things” to “knowing 20% about 5 things” to “knowing 33% about 3 things” – and stopping this reduction when I don’t feel like pushing the comfort zone out any more…
However what this requires, as you quite rightly point out, is a *plan* – where do *I* want to be in 5 years time, and how do *I* get there.
I try to make my own personal mantra “Today is going to be a good day, because I’m going to *make* it a good day” – why don’t I extend that to my career / life…