“Jack of All” & “Master of One”

When I was growing up, I loved playing sports. Everyday after school I’d beg my parents and sister to go outside and play American football, soccer, basketball, or baseball. However, I always felt drawn to one sport in particular: tennis. By the time I was 12, this love was so ingrained into me that it was all I ever wanted to do. I’d play before school, after school, on the weekends, for my school, for my club. It was my everything. I even loved it so much that while I wasn’t playing tennis, I would mime hitting forehands with nothing but my empty hand.

Despite my love for tennis, it turns out my laser-focus on that single sport may have have actually impeded my development both as an athlete, and as a tennis player. I’d probably have been better off splitting my time between tennis and other sports. This is supported by recent sports research that shows early sport specialization is not good for developing athletes due to four reasons:

1. It increases the chance of sports injury (which I can personally relate to, I developed a stress fracture in my back when I was 17)
2. It increases the risk of burnout (which I can also relate to, I hated tennis for a time)
3. It creates a false sense of barrier to other participants who see the time costs as being too large (Tennis is fraught with this belief)
4. There is NO evidence that early sport specialization leads to elite athletic performance (also can relate)

While there are certainly examples of successful athletes who specialized very early — Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters come to mind — , this is not the norm. One report found that 88% of NCAA Division 1 athletes played multiple sports growing up. The examples of athletes who excelled at multiple sports at elite levels are also numerous: Bo Jackson (NFL and MLB), Abby Wombach (excelled at basketball and soccer), Jim Brown (averaged 38 ppg in basketball in high school and was considered to be the best lacrosse player in the nation), Jim Thorpe (excelled at football, baseball, track & field, basketball and ballroom dancing), and Babe Didrikson Zaharias (won 2 gold medals in track and field, 10 major championships in golf, and also excelled at baseball and basketball). I’m not saying I would’ve been the next Babe Zaharias or Jim Thorpe if I had stuck to more sports growing up, but hey, I might have.

So, if sports research has shown that specialization hampers athletic development, why haven’t we also studied this in more rigor in the fields of academics and business? Our economic world continues to grow more and more specialized, yet most people seem to never even question this extreme push towards further division of labor. You’d be hard pressed to find a software engineer these days who deals with the entire process of software development.

While specialization has undoubtedly played an incredible role in driving economic growth, I’m skeptical of an over-reliance on specialization that seems wildly out of balance. I believe that the costs of this overemphasis hurt us at the individual, business and societal levels.

Specialization Makes Us Dumber

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith makes a compelling case for the role of specialization in economies. And it appears he was totally correct in his analysis. The world has seen incredible economic growth in the last few centuries and the division of labor has undoubtably played a role in that development. It’s simply a matter of fact that people who are allowed to specialize in an area eventually become very skilled. And a society full of very skilled people leads to benefits for all.

However, it appears even skeptics — myself included — of division of labor taken too far can find comfort in the writings of Adam Smith. In his groundbreaking economic piece of literature, he had this to say about the costs of extreme specialization:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become…But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people must necessarily fall, unless government take some pains to prevent it.

~Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

So, in other words, we all become really dumb when we spend our days doing the exact same thing over and over again. This is pretty apparent when you think about it: humans that never get the chance to think constructively will become really bad at thinking constructively.

On a societal level, these narrowly-focused mindsets often lead us to develop blinders which make it hard to see the system wide impacts of our actions.

For example, imagine a public health official who’s entire job is focused on eradicating food-borne illness. They study the issue and find that a lot of these illnesses are due to practices at food production facilities. Consequentially, they institute incredibly restrictive food safety standards that require all food producers, including farmers, to rigorously test their products. This does a lot of good at reducing the rates of food-borne illness.

However, many small farmers in the region cannot afford to implement these measures and go out of business. And, as it turns out, these small farmers were a key producer of local, healthy produce for the region. As a result of this loss, this community eventually begins to suffer different, but potentially more extreme, consequences due to the decreased availability of healthy food. Clearly, this narrow focus did not actually have the public’s best interest in mind.

A society filled with similarly narrow-focused individuals not only often makes misguided decisions, it also repeatedly fails to think creatively and come up with new innovations.

Steve Jobs, universally regarded as one of the most innovative thinkers in recent times, had this to say about creativity:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” ~Steve Jobs

Basically, creativity is about creating connections between things that weren’t connected before. If you accept this view of creativity, then it’s clear that our overemphasis on specialization is restricting our collective ability to come up with new ideas. Imagine a chef that only specializes in a narrow cuisine. They may become incredible at making that single cuisine’s dishes, but they will never become truly innovative because they don’t have the inspiration to draw from. A diversified, multi-cuisine chef, on the other hand, has the potential to produce creative new dishes that take the best ideas from multiple cuisines and combine them into one spectacular, fusion-inspired dish.

History is filled with examples of how this diversity of perspectives leads to innovation:

• The Wright Brothers invented aviation by bringing their knowledge from bicycles, specifically the need for balance and control, strong but lightweight structures, the chain-and-pocket transmission system for propulsion, and identified key concerns regarding wind resistance and the aerodynamics of the operator
• Johannes Gutenberg came up with the idea for the first printing press in Western culture by observing the action of a wine press
• According to technology historian David Hounshell, Ford’s mass production system — ironically one of the greatest heralds of the benefits of division of labor — was inspired by observing conveyor belt systems at slaughterhouses, flour mills and breweries

The best critique of this negative take on specialization is that effective communication can overcome the downsides of a hyper-specialized world. Engineers with good ideas should be able to talk to doctors, who should be able to talk to biologists, who should be able to talk to businessman, and so on.

Here’s the problem though, we suck at communicating effectively, especially through modern technologies. If you want some examples, just look at the toxic political conversations on twitter. Or how our media sources continue to tailor more and more towards our individual interests instead of exposing us to new perspectives. If you want a more institutionalized example: A 2016 American medical report found that approximately 30% of malpractice cases in a four year period were due to communication issues. This led to the deaths of almost 2000 individuals. In summary, I totally agree that effective interdisciplinary communication could mediate some of the negative effects of hyper-specialization, but we sure as hell don’t have that right now.

Specialization Makes Us Unhappy

Given the fact that an overemphasis on specialization leads to an uncreative society filled with stupid and ignorant individuals that have little constructive influence over their daily work, I’m guessing the idea that this sort of society would also be filled with unhappy individuals isn’t much of a stretch.

However, I’m also guessing you probably don’t want to get your happiness advice from a 18th century economist. For that, let’s turn to a more recent thinker, psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who is recognized as one of the leading thinkers on the science of happiness. Mihály has interviewed thousands of individuals in order to understand what constitutes optimal experience and has published numerous academic articles on this topic. His award-winning book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is a summary of this research.

In Flow, Csíkszentmihályi argues that flow, a state characterized by complete immersion in the present moment and lack of self-consciousness, is the optimal state of human experience. A key quality of flow is that the individual’s skills are matched by the level of difficulty of the task at hand. When a task is too difficult to be completed, individuals fall out of flow state. When the task is too easy, individuals have trouble maintaining flow because the task does not require their full attention.

Extreme specialization means that most individuals spend their time with tasks that quickly become second nature, meaning that the difficulty does not match their skill level. This decreases the opportunity to experience flow, making workers unhappier as a result.

Flow doesn’t just make individuals happier, it also makes them much more productive. One study found that individuals in flow states are approximately five times more productive. Yes, you read that correctly, five times more productive. That means that whatever takes individuals a week in a non-flow state can be completed in a single day of flow. I trust all you employers out there are taking note. And yes, Csíkszentmihályi also offers advice to employers on how to cultivate flow in the workplace.

What We Can Learn

I’m not a big fan of criticizing without offering some solutions. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.” So, here are some of my suggestions for how we can all avoid the traps of hyper-specialization

• Never stop learning. We all should constantly strive to learn as much as we can about a wide diversity of topics if we want to develop our creativity and apply new perspectives in everything that we do.
• Strive to become a “jack of all” and a “master of one.” The division of labor over the past few centuries has led to some incredible economic feats, and we shouldn’t ignore that. However, there is a balance to be struck. I think we can all strive to become a master of one subject, or field, while still exposing ourselves to other topics. In fact, as shown by the studies into the specialization of sports, being a jack of all may even be necessary to becoming a true master of one.
• Try to become a systems thinker which will allow you to avoid the traps of a paradigm mindset, or developing blinders
• Read “Flow” by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and learn how to cultivate more opportunities for flow and happiness in your life
• Increase the opportunities for effective interdisciplinary communication. As discussed earlier, interdisciplinary communication could mediate some of the negative impacts of specialization. If we’re going to cultivate more of these opportunities though, we must create more spaces and opportunities for this to occur. Companies need to hire a greater diversity of perspectives and ensure that they’re all given the chance to collaborate. Media organizations should purposely seek out different perspectives on topics and expose their readers to them. Individuals should get out of their specialized bubbles and talk to people with different backgrounds. Educational institutions should promote more collaboration between departments.

To conclude, I’m sure there’s a lot of things I haven’t thought of that can be done to re-balance ourselves. But hey, I never claimed to have all the answers. I do know one thing, though. I’m not going to figure more of them out by only reading more on specialization…