Generalize or Specialize? Curious Career Choices
On the days when I think of the world in binaries alone, I see people as generalists or specialists. A lot of specialists I know are people who knew relatively early on who they wanted to be: a doctor, a teacher, an astronaut (okay, the last is not someone I know sadly). Then there is everyone else, and we often figure our path through classic trial and error. In the early years of my career, I often asked people around me if their jobs were directly or obviously related to their degrees. Some, such as accounting, of course were but others, not so much.
My degree in Economics, a brief stint in editing , and then a long one in Corporate Social Responsibility didn’t have a throughline, at least a visible one. Of course there were some classes about economic development and societal impacts etc but there wasn’t a clear correlation. I did not go onto become a subject matter expert in Economics or in consulting, a path several friends took. Rather, I worked in philanthropy at a consulting firm (KPMG): not a place where I should have landed if you looked at my degree but it was exactly where I needed to be, at the intersection of the private sector and the development world.
In the last ten years, I’ve gotten to do some pretty.. different things in the context of work. There was the somewhat dubious interpretation of Delhi’s history for German tourists, taking photos of people at large volunteering events (like the Delhi marathon, which I never ran but definitely jumped across the pavement for), being an admin for a grad school professor, whose field I understood nothing about but I did learn how to coordinate a large pizza order for hungry grad students. The list goes on, and what makes it great for me at least, is that these experiences keep me sharp. There is hardly ever a dull day at work but occasionally when I have tine to reflect, I find myself thinking about the connection between all of these adventures, some of which were more intense than others. I'm not joking, I had to board a train from the tracks on the return leg of a work trip from a small city where train platforms...were optional?
In recent years, I think about what being a generalist means, in my life and in the world around me. I do have a specialization, I manage projects, I even have a certification to prove it. My most meaningful projects and work so far has been taking things which are either new or fuzzy from their existing state (where they are either just an idea or aren't doing well) to a point at which they become smooth operations, whether to hand over or to manage. But they are also very different from each other: scholarship programs at undergraduate colleges, programming for students working on micro-entrepreneurship projects, staffing school lunchrooms, work in the domain of public healthcare as a result of the pandemic such as launching an online health screening tool and setting up COVID-19 vaccination sites. The one thing they have in common is that they have all been development and/or education focused, and I have found meaning in them.
Something on the internet pointed me to the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and it was a pretty insightful read. The author’s previous book was about overspecialization in Sports, and this one starts with a look into the childhoods of Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and most interestingly the chess player Susan Polgar. The book isn’t an argument for or against; rather it illustrates the decision making and makers of some recognizable examples (think of the Challenger disintegration, Game Boy's success, Charles Darwin’s work) and cautions against the narrowness that makes even the most brilliant among us miss the forest for the trees.
Of course, it also helps to leave with names for concepts you have encountered but not formally learned: Fermi problems (which need you to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data - think of the interviews where they want you to estimate how many window cleaners New York has) and withered technology: old enough to be easily understood without specialization - explained in the product development context of the Game Boy, a beloved product despite the tiny screen and limited colors.
One of the author's most elegant directives is to remind us that ‘we need habits of mind which allow us to dance across disciplines’. In a more prosaic manner, towards the end, he reminds us to remember to balance the risk of mindless conformity and reckless deviation, a recommendation applicable across several disciplines.