I find myself in a stage of my career where I’m taking a bit of a pause and exploring what comes next. In this stage, I find my mind wandering to questions about who I am. What are my talents and skills and how can I best contribute to the world? I often keep coming back to my need to explore a diversity of sectors, spaces, people and difficult questions in my career. Increasingly,
I identify as being a specialist generalist, with economics training and frameworks guiding the way I look at the world.
In the book “Range: How generalists triumph in a specialized world”, writer David Epstein explores the value of a diversity of life and career experiences. He writes:
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”
Interestingly, he sees a strategic advantage for my species, economists, in applying the skills we’ve obtained through formal training in different settings. He writes about the research of James Flynn, a professor of political studies, who conducted a study at an American university to explore the relationship between the average grades and scores on a test of critical thinking across students of various disciplines: “Each of twenty test questions gauged a form of conceptual thinking that can be put to widespread use in the modern world”.
Which students fared the best? Students majoring in economics outperformed their peers. In making sense of their performance, David Epstein writes:
“Economics is a broad field by nature, and econ professors have been shown to apply the reasoning principles they’ve learned to problems outside their areas”.
In a footnote on this part of the book, the psychologist Robin Hogarth is cited on his writing about economists:
“What strikes me about their discourse…is how terminology and reasoning processes of economics work their way into almost all topics. Whether the topic is sports, economic phenomena, politics or even academic curricula.”
(You can read more about how students in other subject areas fared on the test on page 48 of the book. Without giving the full story away, let me just say that science students perform less well 😉.)
I, like you, live in a world that is shouting for people to become specialists, I’m going to cling to my generalist specialist label for just a little while longer. There is simply too much to explore and be curious about. A diversity of people, skills, subject areas and hard questions that can bring endless joy if we get to know them and answer the hard questions.
