Should You Specialize or Be a Generalist? | Tim Ferriss

so I'd like to explore the question I get a lot which is should I specialize or should I be a generalist and my answer in short would be you should be a specialized generalist so let me explain what that means when I interviewed Scott Adams not long ago I suppose it was a few years ago it doesn't feel like long ago I Scott who is the creator of Dilbert I looked up some of his older writing related to career advice and he had some really sage advice that I have applied in many many many ways since in concrete form and his recommendation in brief although I'm paraphrasing here of course is try to combine a handful of skills that are rarely combined in other words if you want to just specialize and become a basketball player you really need to be in the top zero zero zero one percent to do phenomenally well financially and otherwise on the other hand if say you combine two skills that are valuable but even more rare and therefore more valuable together in many instances like a computer science degree and a law degree or extreme knowledge of finance and or mathematics plus public speaking automatically you have a competitive advantage that allows you to more likely end up saying the top decile of earning power alright so you're not trying to master a thousand different skills you're not dabbling as a dilettante and a million things and never going say a mile-deep but you are spreading yourself out across multiple skills that are rarely combined and can be very effectively combined Warren Buffett as one example the world's most or certainly one of the world's most successful investors although anybody who's interested should check out renaissance capital as another extreme example of investing success but Warren Buffett has said that his best investment was in I believe Dale Carnegie speaking course because being a good speaker having a command of communication in spoken form and and inform one's very good writer really provides you with an Archimedes lever for whatever other skills you happen to have because there are many who are say technicians in a specific field but are not able to communicate effectively to lay people without dumbing things down weren't very good at this and therefore I would encourage you to consider public speaking writing and negotiating to be three very easy add-ons or multipliers for whatever your core skill or skills might be those will give you an immediate competitive advantage and when I think about my own career choices the best career choice is the best project choices that I have made I also tend to think about winning even if I fail and this is also borrowing very much from Scott Adams although I did this prior to being exposed to Scott what that means is I'm choosing my projects what I commit time to over say a six to twelve month period based on the skills and the relationships I will develop that can transcend or persist after that project alright so if you look at my experience with different types of startup investing say early on advising stumble upon which didn't work out but then later I ended up becoming involved with uber that's a great example of this principle in practice if you look at my experience with the 4-hour chef and the experimental Amazon publishing which did not work out as well as one would have hoped but then my relationship that I developed with Houghton Mifflin HMH that then transferred over later to my work with tools and Titans okay then you have different types of skills like being interviewed for podcasts during the launch of the 4-hour chef and for our body so you have Joe Rogan Marc Maron Nerdist Chris Hardwick all these people I learned so much from being interviewed by which is then informed starting the podcast in 2012-2013 after the 4-hour chef so these are independent projects that one could say objectively failed on some level that unless planted the seeds in the form of relationships and skills that gave me a thousand X 10,000 extra turn later and that is how you can insure yourself in some ways bulletproof yourself against failure as long as you have those ingredients relationships good people and skills marketable skills that can be transferred to other areas outside of that particular project or experience that it's not siloed and so those are a few of my thoughts on sort of specialized versus generalist and also making career decisions in such a way that you are able to a positive snowball effect whether you are a specialist or a generalist and my particular approach as I mentioned at the very beginning is to be a specialized generals so you're choosing a handful of things that combine very very well as opposed to trying everything or planting all of your bets in one particular spot it can make sense to specialize only if you are the LeBron James of your field or can be in the top top top few percent of what you plan to do you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 603,325

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast

Id: wCPbPMRNnvk

Length: 5min 59sec (359 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020