Depth vs Breadth

I have always been a generalist and I was happy about this. I found myself getting bored by things rather quickly so the life of a generalist was one of interest, you learn a lot and as a result, you are intellectually simulated.

I started to compare my career with a mentor of mine as I attempted to replicate the success he had and put my family and myself in a great position. I noticed one core thing, while he was pretty good at a lot of things there was one he excelled in, operational management. I started to look at and speak to others whose careers I was in awe or appreciation of and found this theme, they excelled in one area and they have a depth of knowledge. I enquired more and the feedback this person gave me was “AJ you have a lot of breath but you’re lacking in depth”, I had never actually seen this to be a problem, most of my life my mother would laugh that I was the jack of all trades and master of none.

However, looking at the careers of those whom I perceived to be top flyers I noticed that they had depth, you may a lot hear this referred to as domain expertise, but it also can be referred to as being T-shaped. A T-shaped professional refers to someone who has deep domain expertise in one discipline, together with various competencies and skills and knowledge from other areas. Throughout the rest of this post, I will use the two definitions in a free-flowing fashion.

Okay, so let’s pull some real-life examples to allow us to further contextualise this notion that a deep level of skills pay the bills. Let’s look at basketball, we have Steph Curry whom we can agree is a great basketball player but his domain expertise is shooting longer distances (how many hours do you think he spent working to acquire this skill?). Let’s look at American Football where you have Randy Moss a first-ballot Hall of Famer who could play both defence and offence but where did he see the more growth, specialising on offence as WR? I am sure you have a few examples of multiple discipline athletes, who have reached the peak in their field such as Usain Bolt… I hate to have to burst your bubble and ground you to the truth but sadly you are not him and he is not you. It is never an optional starting point to compare yourself to multigenerational talent.

Let’s bring this back to the law as my sister is going through this process, having qualified arguably is where you know the most about law however, even in an extremely well-compensated profession people find areas of law that interest them (reasons unimportant) and specialise.

Being T shaped gives you an alpha if your area of expertise is in high demand. The natural progression here is to become an I-type professionals ( I-shaped) who have a very narrow skill in one specific area. I can attest to the pros of being T-shaped, at the time of writing late (early Feb) I am in a job hunt and I can not begin to tell you the number of founders and companies who are not hiring but due to me having an area of specialism in pipeline generation would like to talk and are receptive to creating a role for myself. This reinforced the point made earlier in this paragraph, you will have an alpha

The naturally proceeding question is how do I become T-shaped? As with all things in life, it starts with you, you have to have an interest in an area of your work where you can throw yourself into and begin that journey to find mastery. For me the core areas that helped me develop faster have been consuming content, creating content and collaborating with industry experts (paid and free).