Society commonly looks down on a "Jack of All Trades.”
It's understandable given the increasing specialization of our workforces, time required to hone a craft (10,000+ hours), and limited time on this planet.
However, I’d assert the contrary:
- That history, modern business, and recent trends in ML support more generalized cultivation.
- That a "Jack of All Trades” just might be onto something.
- And that Jack... just might be a King.
Understanding the Spectrum
Human tendency is to simplify spectrums to just their limits. It’s simpler, more black and white, and translates to an easier time for our System 1’s.
In the case of professions, the spectrum tends to simplify to specialists at one end with generalists at the other. Most jobs are then neatly bucketed into these categories with management, consulting, and leadership labeled generalists while researchers, professors, and engineers are labeled specialists. That’s it - nothing in between.
Except not really. Consider managers who have rich technical experience that would easily qualify them as an expert in their field, let alone a specialist (e.g., Andy Grove). Or consider the engineers who have studied enough domains that being a generalist would be a gross understatement of their achievements.
Careful observation with our System 2 proves that there’s indeed a much richer distribution of careers then the originally perceived binomial one. This gap leads to not only a blind spot in professional development, but also a value arbitrage opportunity for those who correctly identify it.
This is where what I dub (albeit a Google search shows I’m not first) generalized specialists thrive. These are the folks who can capitalize on underserved areas by operating across multiple domains, open new frontiers by uniting fields, or share best practices on seemingly orthogonal subjects. It’s not easy by any means, but it’s where value not only accrues but compounds the longer you survive in this region.
I say survive, because not everyone can afford to stay afloat long enough or has the persistence on such a path. But, as we’ll see below, those who do reap outsized rewards.
Evidence Throughout Society and in Life
Let’s look at a few examples of how generalized specialists are behind some of the most important discoveries, leaders, athletes, and notable figures in history.
History
- The “OG" polymath Leonardo Da Vinci - inventor, architect, painter, sculptor, mathematician, engineer, scientist, and the list goes on and on. World class in every category.
- Lincoln was well known for his prolific series of jobs that include (and this is just the tip of the iceberg) railsplitter, boatman, manual laborer, store clerk, soldier, store owner, election clerk, postmaster, surveyor, state legislator, and lawyer. Seemingly unrelated (and some of them definitely are), they often collated in helping him establish his political foundation geographically at the start of his career. In addition, it’s important to note that many attribute his later success as a leader to his diverse life experience that aided him in reuniting the most divided house in US history.
Modern Business
- Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has combined an insatiable curiosity across a broad spectrum of fields and trends (manufacturing, energy, management, software, machine learning, space) to establish companies with innovation at their heart and impact as their legacy.
- There exists many a strong company with one killer line of business, but the titans often have many. In the case of Amazon, we observe its remarkable discipline and eye for opportunity has extended it from e-commerce to AWS, distribution, media, retail, and beyond. As for former American household name General Electric, at the peak of its game it might as well have had a product for every house appliance in the 20th century.
Machine Learning
- Multi-task learning is now common in many state-of-the-art models and breakthroughs include Deep Relationship Networks oft used in vision models, natural language processing (NLP), and many top Kaggle solutions like this amusing one to recognize whales.
- Anecdotally, I’ve also observed superior performance of multi-task learning in multiple projects.
Sports
- Professional athletes with multi-sport experience will attract even more attention from front offices nowadays given the potential observed edge they have in sports.
- Basketball (because there should be one specific mention of basketball in every post) has gone from a game of specialists around the rim to a game of specialized, delineated roles (PG, C, PF, SG, SF) to a game of increasingly fluid roles. The greats of today’s game are often off-the-charts talented with wide arsenals at their disposal to score: LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant.
Contextualizing
Knowledge is one thing, but putting it into practice is another. The negative popularization of “Jack of All Trades” emerged (besides hilariously being a jab at the great Shakespeare) is because it’s not easy to be a generalized specialist. In fact, it’s actually quite hard to either keep reinventing oneself, fight the inertia of an already successful path, or learn a specialization sufficiently deep.
How can one go down the path of learning multiple craft without being caught up as a Jack?
The tried and true method is to originally spike as a specialist and then transition from there into a generalized specialist. Oftentimes, this path is also the hallmark of an infinite learner - one who’s never satisfied with their craft and always pushing their limitations.
Here’s how it looks in different contexts:
- Companies establish an MVP, gain market share, and then search for new areas to reproduce their success either through acquisition or internal development. This is the standard playbook shared by many blue chips (especially tech ones) like Microsoft (OS -> Office, Coding Development, Azure, gaming, etc) and Amazon (e-commerce -> AWS, shipping, e-books, Alexa, retail, etc)
- Employee becomes known for a certain skillset at work which becomes part of their brand and earns him/her access to more opportunities that enable them to further develop even wider ranging expertise. Flywheel effect.
- Giannis Antetokounmpo has shaken the NBA with his inside game and is now rapidly developing his outside game (three pointers) as well as playmaking. If his trajectory follows that of other greats like Michael Jordan, Kobe, and LeBron, I have high hopes for the heights he’ll reach.
- Presidents of the USA have chosen many paths towards reaching the highest position in the land. While never the same, these paths do often share commonality in developing a high degree of competence in one area before moving to the next. In the case of Barack Obama, he's worked as a committee organizer, lawyer, professor of Constitutional Law, writer, and Senator before being sworn in as President.
- Transfer learning is another technique pervasive in machine learning that essentially involves taking an already trained model (i.e., specialist on one set of data/tasks) and now applying it to another set of data/tasks (i.e., generalizing). It’s a powerful technique and key to much of the progress we’re seeing in both the field and enterprise today. Without cornerstone releases of open source models like YOLO and BERT, we’d be hard pressed to see the current proliferation of innovative ideas and startups by the community.
It’s important to note that becoming a generalized specialist typically involves combining fields and skillsets that have (whether obvious at first or not) synergies. The more synergistic, the higher the compounded value over time. That’s why we observe many of the above examples tend to develop specializations in fields that are additive and complement the original specialization.
Bottom line, wouldn’t recommend becoming a generalized specialist of say cheesemaking and marine biology unless those are really your two greatest passions in life and your wallet can afford it.
Balancing the Spectrum
But is being a generalist or a specialist even a bad thing?
I’d argue that being too much a generalist is where the negative association of "Jack of all Trades" originates - someone who fails to go sufficiently deep in any topic and as a result 1) fails to develop above average performance in any field and 2) fails to develop a foundation with which to carry into other fields. It’s all the calories without any of the benefits and opens oneself up for either easy replacement or lack of career trajectory.
As for being too much of a specialist, I'd argue this is unlikely assuming one’s field isn’t of zero relevance to the needs of the world. A good friend often reminds me that what awed him about working at Apple (and makes it so great) is how so many of his colleagues were the best of the best in their extremely narrow field. We can observe from this that 1) being too specialized can be highly valued and 2) that Apple further supports the case for generalized specialists given it’s basically just a collection of many specialists.
However, a word of caution. Becoming too much of a specialist still makes one highly susceptible to periods of intense disruption, akin (but not exactly the same) to replacement for generalists. Much like a specialized machine learning model that only focuses on one task or is trained on a limited range of data (basically all models), performance can and will suffer when the rules of the game change and unseen situations are encountered.
Of note, these are the times when anti-fragility is required, and these are the times when generalized specialists will thrive in particular. Generalized specialists will be able to survive in nearly all conditions much like the (rare truly all) weather investment portfolio, but will particularly thrive in times of massive change.
Conclusion
All this is to say we've observed there’s actually a gap in how we simplistically classify our workforce, and from that gap emerges the generalized specialist. These are individuals who create synergies with both their breadth and depth of knowledge. They’re behind many groundbreaking achievements as well as value accreting events throughout history and are constantly redefining the world today.
But, like most things worth pursuing in life, it’s not an easy path to follow. No blueprint, significant investment, constant change, frequent reinvention, and challenging common wisdom.
Many remain a Jack, few ascend to King/Queen.
