On specialists and generalists
Feb. 8th, 2026 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
posicScotts D. Clary in Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/scottdclarypage/posts/pfbid0FHrWsAqeoPKQYaMHzQoc2M1tmutvmf3qhCXqQsu5guuATq6meYTLdM2vuQkeUnaal -- posts a picture with the text on it:
"Underrated career advice: Become dangerously good at something specific before you try to become broadly competent. Depth creates leverage. Breadth creates options. But depth comes first---you can't diversify what you haven't yet concentrated."
and also writes in plain text:
"Generalists are just specialists who diversified too early.
Most people spread themselves thin from the start. A little marketing, a little sales, a little product, a little ops. They call it being well-rounded. Really it's being forgettable.
Nobody hires "pretty good at several things." They hire the person who's undeniably great at one thing.
That's where leverage comes from. When you're the obvious choice for a specific problem, you don't compete on price. You don't compete at all. People come to you because there's no real alternative.
Breadth comes later. Once you've built something off your depth, you can expand. The specialist who branches out has a foundation. The generalist who never specialized has a resume full of surface-level experience.
Go narrow first. Uncomfortably narrow. Become the person people think of when they have a specific problem.
Then diversify if you want. But not before you've built something worth diversifying from."
***
Good advice for mathematicians, too (even if for a different reason). A broad mathematical education contributes a lot to one's qualification, but it is pointless to attempt to do original research in all kinds of unrelated directions simultaneously in young age. In more advanced age, with deeper understanding and vision, those all kinds of directions become not unrelated for you anymore, even if they remain to appear unrelated to superficial observers.
"Underrated career advice: Become dangerously good at something specific before you try to become broadly competent. Depth creates leverage. Breadth creates options. But depth comes first---you can't diversify what you haven't yet concentrated."
and also writes in plain text:
"Generalists are just specialists who diversified too early.
Most people spread themselves thin from the start. A little marketing, a little sales, a little product, a little ops. They call it being well-rounded. Really it's being forgettable.
Nobody hires "pretty good at several things." They hire the person who's undeniably great at one thing.
That's where leverage comes from. When you're the obvious choice for a specific problem, you don't compete on price. You don't compete at all. People come to you because there's no real alternative.
Breadth comes later. Once you've built something off your depth, you can expand. The specialist who branches out has a foundation. The generalist who never specialized has a resume full of surface-level experience.
Go narrow first. Uncomfortably narrow. Become the person people think of when they have a specific problem.
Then diversify if you want. But not before you've built something worth diversifying from."
***
Good advice for mathematicians, too (even if for a different reason). A broad mathematical education contributes a lot to one's qualification, but it is pointless to attempt to do original research in all kinds of unrelated directions simultaneously in young age. In more advanced age, with deeper understanding and vision, those all kinds of directions become not unrelated for you anymore, even if they remain to appear unrelated to superficial observers.
