Everyone welcome to nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean McClure, in this episode will take a look at the difference between being a specialist and being a generalist will see what it means to know something very well with deep expertise and what it means to know a little about. Many different things will take a look at how this leads to a kind of tension, since we want to be really good at what we do, but also engage in many different aspects of life.
Inevitably, this leads to a kind of balancing act between the breath in our lives and the depth in our lives, only to have us fall on one side of that equation. Leading us to struggle to relieve a tension between Specialization and generalization. I will argue that to be fulfilled, we need to be both a specialist and a generalist and not the right approach is to go deep into one thing and learn how to apply it everywhere.
Ultimately, I will contend that to be a good generalist, one must specialize. I think it's going to be an interesting episode. Let's get started. So in this episode I'm going to touch on 4 main points.
The first part is the apparent dichotomy between specialization and Generalization, and I'll talk about why I'm calling that apparent as we move through the episode, they will look at how something is missing when we try to our inevitably kind of find ourselves on one side of either, specializing or generalizing. It's not not really fulfilling we, for some reason want both.
Then we'll talk about how we try to reconcile that and how that often fails, and then I'll end off by looking at what I think is the solution to reconcile this. You know apparent dichotomy or paradox between specialization. Generalization how you can actually do both in a way that makes sense and ultimately leads us to being fulfilled. So let's start with the apparent dichotomy. First, we'll start with some basic definitions, things that we.
We already recognize you know what does it mean to specialize in something. This is obviously to concentrate on one particular area to be an expert, to focus on a particular subject or skill, to confine yourself to one or very few activities. And it makes sense in a lot of scenarios to specialize, because that's how you're going to get recognized for something you know you're going kind of deeper into the topic, and so that's going to feel good. You get a kind of mastery over what you do.
And so there's this natural attraction to being a specialist to specializing in a particular area. And then, of course, there's the generalization, which is typically framed as you know. Obviously the opposite of specializing, and this is where we get our hands into. Many different things were exposed to a lot of different topics or areas of life or projects, and in this scenario, the knowledge is only surface deep, right?
We only kind of skim things at the surface, but we know it well enough that we can hopefully. Contribute a little bit and help solve problems across a wide variety of topics and the saying there is Jack of all trades and master of none. I think we're all familiar with that, saying so we can either specialize or we can generalize, and I think it makes sense why certain people might be attracted more toward specialization. In certain people might be attracted more towards Generalization.
You might want to know something really deep. You might want to be known for it. It feels good, but maybe you get bored easily and maybe you want to touch on different projects or topics throughout your life and so generalization ends up being the more attractive option. So the assumption here is that these are different things, and I think the assumption seems to make sense. They do seem like polar opposites and and what makes them seem like polar opposites is this idea of finite time.
There's only a certain amount of time you have in a day. A week, a month, a year, technically, your whole life. And that time has to be either be devoted to a few things or spread out. And maybe you change that up throughout your life. Maybe at one point you're specializing. And then maybe you're generalizing later. But there's this this kind of finite amount of time that you have to use and you don't get to cheat time, right? And because we don't get to cheat time.
You have to use it seemingly in one of the two ways right, to vote it largely to one area or spread it across many different things, and so we have this apparent dichotomy between the two. So I'm going to, as an example, use 3 characters, and I'm going to introduce here. It's going to be. Three people who have specialties.
And but also want to get kind of involved in many different things, and this is what I'm going to use to kind of frame frame this problem going forward as I talked about the episode and kind of bring it rapid around at the end as we talk about how we might, you know, merge the specialization and generalization to a kind of a single unified concept. So who are these people? So the first one is going to be a probability finance guy.
OK, so this is someone who's been working in finance along time and he's obviously working out problems and trying to come up with solutions in the world of Finance. Maybe he's working in mutual funds, maybe works at hedge fund. It doesn't really matter.
As he's trying to participate in the market, he is relying more and more on statistics on mathematics because he finds he needs to try to solve the problems that he's trying to solve, and so he starts going deeper and kind of more esoteric into the world of probability. And it's not just probability at a high level, it's really getting into, say, a particular type of distribution.
OK, so let's say if you can remember back if you're not currently Privy to mathematics and statistics, you will go back to high school or whatever you can imagine that when we try to visualize data. You know our information. We typically think in terms of probability distributions. It's these curves. The most common well known one is the Bell curve, right? Also called the normal distribution or the Gaussian distribution, and so we know what that looks like.
It looks like a balance, so it's kind of a way of visualizing what the most likely outcome of an observation or measurement is. Aurora collection of data, so we're not here to talk about probability distributions, but what I want to paint a picture of is that this finance guy has gone really deep into understanding a particular. Type of distribution right? So you got the Bell curve but you have other ones. You've got ones that are related to power laws and it doesn't matter the whole list.
You know technically. Hundreds if you really get into it, and so he is focused on a very particular type of distribution because it relates to the types of problems he was solving, and so this is quite esoteric, right? I mean it doesn't. It wouldn't be obvious to most people what that specialization would have to do with anything other than what his problems are other than what he focuses on and then another one is, say, a girl who developed software. Now software is. That's too general, so.
Let's say she develops a certain type of software related to cryptocurrency, and even that's a bit general because there's different things you can do with cryptocurrencies. So say she is working on a very specific type of technology that allows file sharing within this kind of public Ledger that exists in cryptocurrency platforms.
Now you don't know anything about Crypto currency, just understand that this is a girl who works on a very specific type of software, solving a very specific type of problem, very esoteric, very specialized, and then our last example will be a sculptor, so something out of the out of the technology space. You know he or she is using, you know clay or metal or whatever the material is to model different shapes and to create art and to present that art in museums or whatever.
So we have the finance guy. We have these software developer and then we have the sculptor, three areas that three different people are specializing him. Well, as individuals they will also probably not just want to do that right. They're not going to probability isn't just going to want to devote his entire existence to the idea of a single probability distribution in statistics.
I mean, it's just so myopic, so esoteric that if he has any humanity to him at all, he's going to want to branch out and do other things. That's natural. Same with the software developer saying with the sculptor, so they might want to get involved. You know in sports, maybe they want to watch sports. Maybe they want to play sports. Maybe they want to talk about sports. They might want to get involved in politics and start making comments about political issues or social issues.
Maybe they want to volunteer their time. This is very human, right? I mean we can specialize up to a point, but eventually we want to engage with the world we want to participate and do different things. We don't want to view our life entirely through some myopic aperture of what we do. Specifically, OK, some people will find themselves doing that, and some people will find themselves generalizing. But it seems to be there. Is this dichotomy between the two.
And so here's the issue is that if we take these three people and they want to get in sports or politics and volunteer their time, then they feel like they need to give up the effort. Directed towards their specialization often, I mean we find ourselves most listener should be able to relate to this.
You might be going deep into something and then something else comes up in life and we want to participate in that and so again going back to that finite amount of time that we have available, we find ourselves taking the time out of the specialty and applying it towards the generalization or vice versa. Obviously you could be having to take time out of your generalization. We are engaged in all kinds of things and apply it towards Specialization. Otherwise you're not going to get.
Good at something you're not going to continue to improve, so, so let's use an example of going through our career. I think this is something that a lot of us can relate to. You might be, you know, doing something at an introductory or kind of a junior level. Let's say within a company, and you're doing that for a few years and then you start to move up the corporate ladder, so to speak. And in doing that you're obviously taking on more responsibility.
You're taking on more tasks, and you're going to find yourself moving, probably from what was kind of a specialty towards a generalization because you're in charge of more people you're delegating. You have to have a holistic kind of Birds Eye view of what's happening and so whether you like it or not, you are going to be doing a lot of Generalization, and it's probably more general than what you're doing at a junior level.
Another example would be if you are, let's say you're passionate about something in life and you're really good at it. You're an expert and so you want to start your own company and so you become an entrepreneur and you bring your passion to the world via business so it could be a product that you're creating. It could be a consulting service that does the kind of work that you specialize in. It's going to be very much the same story as.
As the individual moving up the corporate ladder was in the context of you had this specialty, you brought it to the world. But when you took on so many more responsibilities, you of course, uh, forced to generalize, and so this could be your getting involved in more human resource is 'cause you have to hire people. Maybe you're getting involved in the pre sales process.
Maybe your pricing projects if it's related to consulting, and chances are even though you might like some of those extra things, a lot of the tasks you take on as you move up in your ear are not things you want to be doing it.
You know the reason that you started which was related to This passion, this thing you were really good at starts to get kind of diluted and you have to delegate that to other people and at some point you know we find it really hard to blend the idea of specialization generalization. I don't think a lot of people want to let either one go. Some people maybe are comfortable with that, but I would argue eventually this kind of leads to a bit of attention.
And so we find ourselves having to choose one. We either want to go deep and want to know something well, and therefore we specialize or we want or half. Do you know, generalize such as moving up the corporate ladder? Or maybe becoming an entrepreneur? Whatever it is in life, we may be forced into generalizing or feel that we want to touch on many different topics, engage in many different things. But we are choosing one.
It's very hard to try to reconcile those two, but that doesn't prevent us from feeling like something is missing. I think a lot of us can relate to that tension always being there. If we go deep. We're not engaging enough, and if we're engaging in all kinds of things. We're not really being recognized or respected for knowing something really well, and I think that bothers a lot of us.
We do want some how to reconcile this idea of being both a specialist and a generalist, but it does seem impossible because there's only a finite amount of time and we have to apply it accordingly. So we try to figure out what we often fail, and of course in this episode I want to talk about how to reconcile those things. Maybe there's a way to think about Specialization Generalization as a more unified concept, 'cause if we It means that there would be a way to do both in your life.
You could be very engaged in doing a lot of different things, but you could also be respected for knowing something quite deep. So let's move into our second part of the episode, which is peeling back the layers of that feeling of something missing. The friction that comes about when we just choose one side of that equation, but we ultimately are trying to strike a balance between specialization.
An generalization, so I'm going to take a current event COVID-19 the coronavirus are all obviously familiar with this situation and the impact it is having on our lives. I'm going to use this as an example of wanting to kind of branch out into area that you're not a specialist in, but having reasons to do so are being compelled to kind of way in on the conversation, or potentially even make some contribution to the area. So let's go back to our specialist. We have the probability finance guy.
We've got the software specialists doing cryptocurrency, and we have the sculptor. So all three of these individuals with their specialties are going to be impacted by COVID-19 the way we all have the finance guy is participating in the market, so we know that the market is taken. A drastic drop of the last few months. So anything he does, whether it's mutual fund, hedge fund, whatever it is, he is. Obviously his business is going to be impacted the way that he normally contribute to society.
Individual creating crypto security software. Let's say she has her own business and maybe it's a product that she puts out into the market. Well, she normally has a pipeline of clients that she reaches out to and tries to get to purchase her. Her software, well, nobody is really in the buying mood right now, right? Because the COVID-19 people have pulled back there playing it safe. You know, they're trying to focus on whatever buffer capital they might have.
They're not looking to purchase new solutions, at least not as much as they would you know, months prior to take over 19, so her business has been impacted on the sculptor. Let's say here she has a studio where maybe they teach sculpting. Well, they've had to board up, let's say like a lot of small businesses have and take their business back home. Maybe do it online, whatever it is. The Finance Guy. The Crypto security software developer, the sculptor.
Their specialty, their passion, their way of life has been impacted by the coronavirus. Now I would argue that's going to compel them to want to comment on the situation. At the very least, and maybe even make some kind of genuine contribution to the fight against the virus. Because if you have something like this that hits home for you, you don't typically want to just sit idle and standby. At the very least, you want to kind of express yourself, and that might be online.
You might want to write a blog post about it. You might even want to make a genuine contribution so the finance guy being involved in data and analysis. There's you know, kind of. Some may be obvious overlaps between those two. I mean obviously understanding the dynamics of a virus and how it spreads and trying to squash the curve and all. This business is related to data analysis and the building of models.
A lot of solutions get born out by the way of software today, so the girl building the Crypto security software might have ideas about how to make a genuine impact by maybe coming up with some kind of solution of putting something online that gathers information, whatever it is. The sculptor not being directly related in anything analysis or technology doesn't have an obvious overlap, but no less compelled to want to.
You know, maybe write something online or talk about how businesses are impacted, or maybe even make some kind of genuine contribution even though it's not obvious what that would be now and I'll touch on that a bit later when we look at overlaps, but. The message at this point is that these individuals, who have all been impacted are going to want to weigh in on the situation, and that's kind of a situation where you have these specialists wanting to branch out and generalize.
Now doesn't have to be a major event like coronavirus. Again, it could be some of the examples I gave towards the beginning wanting to get involved in sports or volunteer your time, or maybe get involved in a social issue, whatever it is, but I want to use the Coronas, an example 'cause it's timely. And if you look online you will see a lot of people obviously weighing in their And doing some analysis and trying to contribute.
So there's a lot of people who are kind of coming out of that specialty shell and and at least attempting to say make a contribution to the conversation. So Why is that interesting well? If we think about that situation. We kind of have something that we might call, you know, the arm chair specialists kind of coming out of their shell and dropping their opinion for everyone to read or to here.
And you know, this kind of causes a bit attention to the people doing yet and the people you know reading a lot of the opinions or even some of the solutions that come out. And that's because we know that the majority of people trying to weigh in on this issue are not epidemiologists, right? They are not. Experts in virology. They don't study viruses or how they spread, they don't understand their dynamics. They don't, you know examples. I'm giving the not study.
You know they're not studying the health of individuals and how the biochemistry or whatever inside the body is affected by virus or whatever it is. Whatever could possibly over late with the epidemiological concerns of COVID-19 at the three examples I gave, these people are not in a position to go to have a level of expertise whereby it would make sense that they should weigh in on it, OK? So they're compelled to do it. But they're kind of, you know, they're out of there.
Out of the realm, that kind of acting as an arm chair experts. And because of that, it's not obvious that they can make a genuine contribution. And whatever they do is not necessarily going to be respected. In fact, it might be fought against. So if you go online, you'll see a lot of people saying that we're just not sure expert. You know why should I listen to you?
And so, logical fallacy is aside being, you know, whenever you try to argue from authority, that's not really related to the validity, let alone soundness of an argument anyway. But you know, people do have a point because we do reach out to. Experts, we expect them to know what they're doing. And so this is a situation of. Wanting to branch out but not being an expert to do so. And so some things off here. So what does that mean?
I mean, if we're one of these individuals, or just take yourself as an example, whatever expertise is. If it's not Epidemiology. You know, we just kind of shrink back into our shell and not make a comment. Do we? Do we just give up on the dream of trying to contribute anything even though it might have aspects of it that are kind of related to what I do? You know, there's some analysis there.
There's some data, or you know, I think software could help this situation or even sculpting might somehow kind of overlap. Maybe the ability to motivate people to create things, you know, whatever it is. But because of the lack of obvious expertise, there's this kind of tension and so. You shrink back to the specialty or do you treat keep trying to force the generalization so we try and the odds of it working are pretty low.
And so we're back into this situation where we've got this apparent dichotomy between specialization generalization. Leading to friction and there's this inevitable attempt to balance those two sides of the equation. And I would argue that we are compelled all throughout our lives. To do this. I mean the Corona is a timely example, but there's always going to be things that pop up in your life that are going to make you want to contribute to it, right?
And as I alluded to in the beginning, this is part of being human. We want to contribute to be engaged in different things, meet different people. We want to learn different things we don't want to be relegated to just the one you know, skill that were supposed to have. The thing that we know deeply. We want to do that too. We want to be an expert. We want to be respected for something, but I want to be able to branch out. And have my hands in a lot of different things.
So where does that leave us? Well? A common approach to try to resolve this. I mean, it's probably called all kinds of different things, but you may have heard it and they call it the shape, and the idea is that you try to structure your life around. Going broad on a lot of different things, but then having the one thing you go deep on so you can have your specialty where you go really deep and that would be the vertical line of AT.
And then you can also have all these kind of cursory interests in your life. They could be hobbies. You know they could be the sports. That could be politics of volunteering your time. Some of those examples, whatever it is, and so you kind of take a T shape and you could do this professionally in your business or as an employee. Let's go back to that example of climbing the corporate ladder. Or maybe being an entrepreneur.
You know you're going to have to dip your hands into a lot of different things, so you're going to have to have the horizontal line of the T, right? You're going to have a breath to your life. But you want to have kind of a depart too, so maybe just pick one thing that you're really good at, that you'll be known for, and then you kind of have this. T shaped approach to live. So the probability guy is going to know his distribution really well.
Very esoteric, very specific, but he's going to be involved in different things, some more or less related to analysis. But you know, maybe he plays soccer. Maybe it's not related at all. Maybe he volunteers at a soup kitchen, you know the girl, Brill, building, crypto security software? She's going to be really good at that specific type of software development, but maybe she does other things on the side and kind of T approaches that T shape the sculptor is really good at sculpting.
But that's not to say that she doesn't. You know, maybe like classical music and maybe maybe even something scientific, which is, again, totally unrelated. Not something she's going to be particularly good at, but she has some kind of cursory interest, so we kind of take the T shape. And. I think most of us have tried this, no?
That it doesn't really work because we go back to the situation that I started with at the beginning, which is we're in this dichotomy between specialization and Generalization, and it's not obvious how to get them to how to get the two to work together, and so we find ourselves falling to one side of the equation again. You can take the T shape all you want.
But chances are you're going to be just on the horizontal line of the T for the majority of the time, or just on the vertical deep specialization for the majority of your time, and so you're not really achieving AT at all, because all your doing is saying there's this dichotomy, and that wouldn't it be nice to go deep and broad in our lives. So let's aim for the T. But how many people really successfully do that? How many people have all these interests but are able to go deep in one thing now?
Some people are able to do this, and I'm going to talk about that in the last part of the episode when I look at the resolution to this. But the overwhelming majority of people, and probably a lot of letters included. They have this tension between specialization generalization. They probably try whether they like it or not, because it's somewhat inevitable to structure their lives around this T shape. But inevitably fall back to just going either horizontally or going vertically.
It's really hard to strike a solution that satisfies both and, so the real tragedy here is that. If you try to take this T approach, you end up not being really good at anything. In other words, you're not going to be a very good generalist because you're not really devoting the time to being a good generalist, I mean. To be a generalist is its own kind of Specialization. You could almost argue, right?
I mean, you could be really good at seeing a Birds Eye view of something, understanding things at a holistic level. You know orchestrating the solution as opposed to going deep into one area.
There are people that are very good at being generalists and respected for being generally, so you could do that really well if you devoted again that finite amount of time to generalization to generalizing, just as you could be really good at specializing if that's where you devoted your time, but you could do it. Incorrectly, you could do it badly.
You could be a bad specialist, and again I would argue it's because we're going to find ourselves in the T shaped whether you like it or not, you're going to get pulled into broad things because we're human. We want to get engaged. You're going to get pulled deep into something 'cause we're interested in specifics, and we want to learn something really well. Want to be known for?
I want to be respected for it, so you're going to find yourself in the T, but the T is what's making you neither good at Specialization or generalization. And so that's the tragedy It's one thing if you just found yourself on one side of the equation, we're able to devote your whole time to it, but you won't. Because life is going to present you with the team you're going to go for it at some point. You're going to go for that even if you don't call the T right?
You're going to try to go deep and broad. That's what it means to be human. But the T itself. Has this tragedy to wear? It means you're probably not a good specialist organ generalist and so now you've kind of compound. Did you know the tension of being unhappy 'cause you kind of can't decide between specialization, generalization, and now you're structuring your life around the shape and now you're not going to either one, so let's just do a quick recap.
We have the apparent dichotomy between Specialization and generalization. We get attracted to one side. We kind of feel like we have to choose, but that leads to attention. Something's missing. So we talked about that tension in our lives. When if your specialist going to generalize. If you're generalizing, you're going to want to And then we moved into talking about the attempt to reconcile that.
Taking something like AT shape, where you go broad, but you go deep and you try to have both of these in your life. And that just ultimately kind of leads to a tragedy whereby you're not good at generalizing or specializing. And so there's this constraint to this problem, right? This constraint of time. It doesn't seem to have a resolution to it.
Like I said at the beginning, there is only amount of finite amount of time that you either devote to one or a few things, or which you spread across a large number of tasks, and so it seems impossible to reconcile these. You can't have both, there's always a cost to something, so you either take the T shape and not be really good at either specializing. Why generalizing?
Or you devote yourself to one thing and live, knowing that you're either not engaged in many things or you're not really that good at anything, so. That doesn't seem like a great situation, but we know that there's got to be more to the story here. Because we do see people.
Out there that seem to have kind of figured this out and I don't know if they explicitly know why or how they figured it out, but I'm interested in, you know, in this podcast and picking apart those mechanisms thinking about the patterns that. That you know I've uncovered by looking at these situations, and I think. I think I understand what this resolution is and I think it's really worth exploring, and so I want to do that now. How? How is it that some people seem to?
Be really, really good at something, whether they're known for did not. You can tell they have that specialty. You can tell you know they understand. You know the few deep concepts that are required to be really good at something to Excel at something, but they're also all over the place. You know they might be writing blogs on politics. They might be volunteering in the soup kitchens they might be making comments related to Epidemiology and will bring that Corona example back in a bit.
But here's the point is, not only are they getting their hands and all kinds of things, they're actually pretty good at them. In fact, the way that they weigh in on the issues or the way that they contribute to. You know a myriad different projects. They're doing it in a way that they are making genuine contributions.
They're not just taking a cursory understanding of something and saying a few useful things you know, or you know, partaking in them because you know it's like more like a hobby in the kind of interested. Know they're making genuine.
Even even sometimes fundamental contributions to these other areas, the blog post about politics has some some real deep meaning or importance to it that needs to be communicated, communicated their ability to get involved in some project that has nothing to do with their specialty. Seemingly, they're able to raise issues or point mechanisms out, or patterns out or.
You know concepts that are actually critical, sometimes to the resolution of that particular project, even though that's not their specialty. So when you see people that are really good at striking this balance between specialization and generalization, it's not that they just do both. It's not that they just decided to structure their life around AT. Which we know due to this kind of finite time constraint doesn't seem to have a resolution to it.
Know what they have done is found a way to take their specialty and apply it. Anywhere you know? Or maybe you know, I say anywhere kind of casually, but they found a way to apply it to many, many different areas, and that's the key to this resolution is that the people that do it well or using their specialization to be good generalist. So I want to dig into that mechanism specifically. I really want to pick that apart because when you look at it for what it is when you really see how.
Once I kind of clicks what people are doing when they do this well. It starts to make a lot of sense, and you see that there is a real resolution to this because it's not about taking time out of one part of that TI and putting it into the other. You know, at the expense of the one you just took it out. It's not about that it's actually unifying the concepts of Specialization and generalization. You know into into a single thing.
So. It's kind of like imagine I don't know if you've ever seen this. You know sometimes these theoretical physicists will try to give an analogy of a wormhole, and I'll take a piece of paper and they'll say, well, here's point day, and here's point. Be on the two pieces of paper and the idea of a wormhole would be that you could actually travel, let's say between A&B instantly or you know much quicker than you would if you were to actually just traverse the regular distance through space.
And so the way the way they paint this picture is they fold the paper so that the points A&B Or. Touching each other and then they stab a pencil through the point and say so. As you can see, if we you know kind of let's say have an extra spatial dimension, because now we're folding the plane. You can get to A to be right away.
So anyway you can go look up YouTube videos of this if you want, but the point is this idea that when you take on a new kind of perception of something, all of a sudden the solution can become quite apparent. So just as the wormhole becomes almost an obvious solution to a problem of getting to A to be, when you add this extra dimension to it. There's this unification of Specialization and Generalization. When you view it the correct way, and so I want to talk about that.
Now I want to talk about how to view that. So let's go back to our three people. So we had the probability finance guy, the cripple security software developer in the sculptor. So let's start with the probability finance guy. Now he know he went deep so deep, so esoteric that his specialization was basically just about a particular way of looking at data, right? A single probability distribution. Or maybe a few probability distributions that fit into a particular class, but.
Very, you know, seemingly constrained to the domain that he's looking at. But here's the key. And anybody who goes really deep into something knows this. Because he went so deep. Into a particular area, what he ended up uncovering. Were universal truths universal in that they no longer belonged, just to probability they no longer belong. Just to finance, they know there were no longer relegated just to the specific. The very specific problem that he was working on it.
And this is what happens when you go really deep into something as you start to uncover patterns that are quite universal, which means they can be shared or useful or contribute to many different areas that. You know, seem like they're unrelated, so let's say this finance guy, you know. He started to realize that. Uh, you know he was using this distribution to think about maybe how people handled risk in the market, how they make decisions you know with a great deal of uncertainty.
Well, soon you would realize that that's actually a pretty universal idea because people are making decisions under uncertainty all the time. You know we're trying to deal with the uncertainty of the COVID-19, and I'll bring that example back a little bit later, but that's a very uncertain situations. What decision should we make? This comes up in politics all the time. This comes up in which policies get passed down. Especially when you have a lack of information.
Well, how do you know what you're supposed to do and you could bring this into all kinds of areas of life and all of a sudden that very specific. You know, esoteric probably piece of probability that was used for, you know, decision-making under risky situations in a very specific situation is now something that is immensely useful to all kinds of different areas.
And this is the key when you go very deep into something you will eventually uncover things that can be applied everywhere, or at least in many, many different places. And in the same thing you know with our other examples, you know the Crypto security software. You know she's going to be developing software, but it's a very specific type of software to solve a very specific type of problem. Getting into final file sharing.
But you know, there's this cryptography and it's information, and maybe you're starting to tease out no aspects of entropy and and how the surprisal of a communication channel, whatever, it doesn't matter, the point is. Is your eventually going to start to pull out things? She would in this example that are no longer just about Crypto security? Not not even just about software development. And even the sculptor, which might sound a bit.
You know how could this possibly overlap with some of the other things that we've been talking about? But sculpting isn't just about sculpting, is it? If you go deep enough into sculpting, you're going to. You understand you know the ability to create things with different materials and how to be creative when you mix and match those mediums, you're going to the history of your craft and how it used to be. Strictly, let's say only clay or only clay and metal or whatever it was.
And then there was kind of this renaissance and all of a sudden all these materials could come into play and the process used to be restricted. Maybe to just you know, the crafting in the modeling. But now processing material got mixed together in that. Created this ability to have a capacity to create all kinds of different shapes and moods and expression, and on and on. Now I'm not a sculptor, but if you were to talk to a sculptor, someone who went really really deep.
You would find that they have uncovered. Intuitively, all kinds of concepts that could actually relate to many, many different areas, and we've seen the success of this kind of thing. You know, if you take Interdisciplinary Science, which has been really big for the last couple decades, this idea where you don't just want the physicist of the campus of the biologist you want to bring these people together along with the engineers, you want different perspectives. You want that diversity.
You want people who have deep knowledge in different areas to come together because there's going to be overlaps critical overlaps between those different areas. And so. What happens when you go deep? Just to reiterate. Really deep is that you uncover universal truths that have overlaps to all kinds of different areas. But you have to go deep to find those overlaps.
You have to be a good specialist to be a good generalist, and you could say vice versa as well if you're a generalist and you're attacking things from all kinds of different areas, well, that's variation, right? That's variety, and that diversity of perspective that you get from being a generalist because you're looking at so many different problems in different areas feeds into your specialty, right? Because you don't have this myopic view of just your one thing.
Now you're getting ideas from all over the place, so it goes both ways to be a good specialist to be generous, to be a good generalist. You got to be a good specialist. They feed off each other and so just as you know, the wormhole visualization with a new perspective, you start to see there is a solution to this. If you think about it the right way, so too is there a solution to the apparent dichotomy between specialization and Generalization when you view it the right way.
So let's go back to the COVID-19 example and bring this full circle. We have the three specialists at the beginning, the probability either if security girl and the sculptor. So we said that they were going to be compelled to contribute in some way. To the conversation at least around COVID-19 or maybe even a genuine contribution to try to fight the problem and they got compelled because it hit close to home. Their businesses were affected. It affected the lifestyle.
There's just this inevitability, and again, Corona is just example I'm using, but it's going to come up again and again in life were going to be compelled to want to contribute to many different things to engage in many different things. So let's use this Corona example. Now, why would the probability guy be able to contribute to something like that? He's not an epidemiologist, he doesn't study viruses.
And you know how they infect people and other things like that, whatever, whatever comes into play to understanding these, you know, epidemiological models and. And how viruses move through a population and what kind of things you can do about it. But we are talking about decision making and we do have a lot of unknowns about this. And we are dealing with, you know, a process. That is what you might call multiplicative and I didn't touch on this before.
But viruses behave a certain way and that behavior is not something that only occurs in viruses. This occurs all throughout nature, and in fact you might find some behavior like this happening in the markets, and so maybe the probability distribution that this this finance guy the specialist was using, dealt with a kind of multiplicative process where things kind of explode exponentially and that leads to the uncertainty and so.
Thinking about things in this probabilistic way actually helps you make decisions when there's this much uncertainty, so you can see what I'm doing here, there's. There are definite overlaps important, maybe even critical overlaps to being able to weigh in on the coronavirus conversation despite not being an epidemiologist despite not being an expert in virology.
The cripple security software you know the girl she's making this product and she puts it into the market and she's got a very, very deep understanding of the file sharing and secure and information transfer. Well, maybe there is a critical solution that allows people to share disparate data sources. Maybe it has to be very private. Maybe we want to know out of the people who died from Corona virus and the people who survive. We want to know their specific attributes. What were their lifestyles?
What were there? What are the features that go into making that individual who they are now? That would be very private data. That's not something that's publicly available typically, but if you could invent a technology that made some that could bring some kind of guarantee to maybe sharing that information, then maybe that would be a critical solution and maybe even goes deeper than that.
Maybe because she went so deep into cryptography and understood information, and you know there's actually an uncertainty aspect to that. Maybe there's something about the way information gets copied from one. Source to a location that actually happens. You know in the RNA or some protein that's involved in COVID-19.
I mean, I'm totally just making things up right now, but the point is there could actually be something quite scientific in terms of a contribution even based on somebody who is doing something very deeply in software. Because at the end of the day it comes down to information and it comes down to how things get copied and how things get replicated and on and on. So what about the sculptor? That seems pretty far fetched in terms of the ability to weigh in any great contribution.
Tribute greatly to the coronavirus, but again, we don't know there could be connections. Perhaps the sculptor in the ability to understand how materials and process come together to create new things. Maybe there's a connection there. Perhaps people studying the coronavirus are looking at, you know, controlling macro molecular shapes that has something to do with maybe designing, you know some kind of remedy. Maybe it's related to the vaccine that we're trying to look for.
It really doesn't matter totally making it up right now, but maybe there is this ability to design macro Mike. Macro molecular shapes and you do it traditionally through. You know complex design scenarios, and it's done at a certain level with amino acid residues and things like this. And maybe there's a better approach to bringing things together to combine, you know different aspects, the starting materials if you will, to achieve new macro molecular shapes.
Maybe there's a way to do it through some kind of special modular Conley combination, and so that's something that's obviously very specific to the biochemistry, but this idea of using modular pieces to come together to combine it into new macro molecular shapes is not just something that would occur in chemistry and biology. That is a universal concept. And now maybe a universal concept that was actually arrived at by a sculptor. Believe it or not, and it's true. Maybe they were.
Maybe they were thinking about how to bring different materials together in a component based fashion or they were originally doing it at a high level. And then they found out how to do something at a lower level. And through that there was this new kind of creativity unleashed. And maybe you could arrive at different shapes. Maybe the topology of what you were creating was more expressive. It was a better representation. It doesn't matter.
And to be clear, I'm making everything up right now, but the point is. Is even something like sculpting? Could have overlaps that you wouldn't realize could have overlaps to something seemingly unrelated as the coronavirus. And here's the point with all three of these specialties is that they would have a real voice. They would have a real contribution to this area because they are an expert in something.
They are an expert in something that could have a critical connection to something like the coronavirus.
The probability guy has looked at the ability to make decisions where there's a large amount of uncertainty and it's a very fundamental specific way of doing it, and it's universal to all kinds of challenges and it should be taken into account by somebody who is saying epidemiologists and working directly in the coronavirus crowd and everybody should be listening to that because it's their expertise they should be listening to the Crypto security girl who makes software.
Because of the way she understands how information gets copied and replicated in how you know entropy plays a role and there may be some critical aspect of that to the coronavirus. Or again, maybe it's the file sharing application. A little more, you know, kind of utilitarian. It's the way to share information effectively, but that is her specialty. That is what she's good at, and it is a genuine, genuine contribution. An even the sculptor.
The way that you bring materials together in a modular fashion. You change the level at which you do it and how that increases the ability to express something and to create new shapes. That could actually have an overlap to the way people piece together. Macro molecular components are molecules or whatever it is on route to some solution, such as a vaccine.
OK, again, I'm making these connections up, but the point is, these are people that do have a real expertise and it could be a critical contribution. And so that's how you do it. That is how you achieve what I would call the shifting T. It's not a rigid T, it's not. It's not just going deep and then going broad, but still seeing these as the dichotomy that aren't really related there directly related to each other. They have a unified concept in that they feed off each other.
The way to achieve it is to go really deep into something uncovered. The universal truths and use that to speak to a wide variety of different areas. You can be involved in all kinds of projects you can comment. On politics you can comment on different policies that are made. You can comment on the coronavirus, you can comment on sports and and the different approaches that are used as a way that you could look at it. If you take your lens.
If you take your specialty and you view all these different things in life through that lens, then you can make a genuine contribution. I think that and I called the shifting T because that vertical piece that is distinctly specialization can shift a cross. The breath of the different things you get involved in and it can shift because you're looking at all those different things through your specialized lens, and I think that's how you do it properly, so wrapped things up.
Here's my advice going forward. First you need to know what your specialty is. What is your wife for being here and you need to be as specific as possible. Now this is something I believe takes a lifetime to figure out fully, but you can keep getting more specific through time, narrowing down what you were effectively put on this earth for. And as you build yourself awareness about what your specialty is, you can look for the Universal Truths. That pop out as you go deeper.
These are the patterns that seem relevant to more than just the thing you're specializing in. This is what allows you to bring you into the many different areas that you might engage in when something grabs your attention and you want to partake in it, bring you into that thing, right? Don't just jump in casually hoping you can contribute.
Look for the overlaps between what you know deeply and the new projects you have every right to contribute to many different things, and you're going to find yourself attempting to do this anyway, but it's got to be you that you bring into those. Thing so, speak with your expertise. Speak about what you know and learn to see everything through your specialty. So I hope that made sense. That was the 2nd episode of nontrivial.
Again, I am open to questions you can find me on Twitter, sea, an underscore, A underscore. McClure, that's shaunee McClure, you have ideas for episodes. If you have any comments about the episodes that you've heard, I'm happy to hear from you. And now that I am live on most of the major platforms, please stop by. And if you can give it a five star rating. If it has a rating system that would be great. That helps me out a lot. You could leave a comment.
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