Should You Specialize or Be a Generalist? | Tim Ferriss

- James thinks a specialized generalist should be a generalist, and his advice is to combine a handful of skills that are rarely combined and can be very effectively combined.

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. Hi, 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.0001% 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, say, in the top decile of earning power. All right, so you're not trying to master a thousand different skills. You're not dabbling as a dilettante in 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, a Dale Carnegie speaking course, because being a good speaker, having a command of communication in spoken form and in written form. Warren's a 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 laypeople without dumbing things down. Warren's 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 choices, 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 6 to 12 month period based on the skills and the relationships I will develop that can transcend or persist after that project. So if you look at my experience with different types of startup investing, say early on advising StumbleUpon, which didn't work out, but then later I end up becoming involved with Uber, that's a great example of this principle in practice. If you look at my experience with the Four 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 of Titans. Okay, then you have different types of skills, like being interviewed for podcasts during the launch of the Four Hour Chef and the Four Hour Body. So you have Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, Nerdist, Chris Hardwick, all these people I learned so much from being interviewed by, which then informed starting the podcast in 2012, 2013 after the Four Hour Chef. So these are independent projects that one could say objectively failed on some level that nonetheless planted the seeds in the form of relationships and skills that gave me 1000x10000x return later. And that is how you can ensure 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 so 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 have 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 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, but 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.