The below is from a recent podcast with David C. Baker and it hits home for me on a few different levels. There’s some worthwhile reflections in here, whether you see yourself as a specialist or generalist, are a consultant, freelancer, employee etc or if you are curious about how non-work inputs shape your work and vice-versa.
My late 20s and 30s were guided by the idea of becoming an “expert generalist”. Lately, I am increasingly motivated by what mastery and continous development looks like for myself.
Recommend the whole episode, but here's the part I chose to highlight for us:
So, the t-shaped the idea is the world is so much more complex than it used to be, and to really be an expert you must dive in so deeply that you could almost find yourself lost in developing expertise. Meanwhile, there's a whole world happening around you, so how do you balance those two things?
The concept is that you don't aim for one or the other, you don't want be a generalist or a specialist, you want to be both. You want to be a specialist in your work, the stuff your clients pay you a lot of money for, you really need to know what you are talking about there and be very very deep. But all of that is the context of being a generalist in your personal life, partly because you need to leave work aside and do other things to retain whatever mental capacity you have left. But also because you need to anchor that deep expertise in a much broader context so that it's not spinning off somewhere and not relevant in the real world.
The balance comes, it's different for everybody I think, but for me, the balance is like this - I need to be good enough as an expert to make money in a sustainable way, to make lot of money in a sustainable way and also to be able to keep learning, so that I am not dying. So that I am still growing mentally.
On the other side of that, I need to have hobbies that are so consuming that it makes me mad when my work life interferes with my hobbies because of time or my work life doesn't deliver enough financial means to pay for these silly hobbies. Because hobbies are a very quick way to lose money! That's where the balance comes in, it’s that balance between what drives you to each of those extremes and also how to bounce back and forth between them.