제너럴리스트가 될지 스페셜리스트 될지 고민이 되는 분들께 빌 게이츠도 추천하고 뉴욕 타임즈 베스트셀러인 책 한권을 소개합니다. 연차가 올라갈수록 제너럴리스트가 되어야 한다고 생각합니다. 다만, 퇴직후를 생각한다면 스페셜리스트의 엣지는 잃치 않는게 중요한 것 같습니다.지금 다니는 광고회사에 프로젝트를 하면서도 광고주는 여러 명의 전문가를 찾지만 결국 전체를 꿰뚫고 있는 제너럴리스트가 필요하다고 생각합니다. 이 책은 스페셜리스트에 대해서 너무 critical 한 면이 없지 않지만 스페셜리스트가 될지 제너럴리스트가 될지는 개인의 선택인 것 같아요. 만일에 molecular biology 나 quantum physics 에 hyperspecialized 하는 것에 열정을 느끼면 얼마든지 추진해보세요. 다만, 다른 분야에 대한 관찰을 할 룸은 만들어 두면 좋을 것 같아요.
We are often taught that more competitive and complicated the worlds gets, the more specialized we al must become. (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts- Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard.
The response, in every field , to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande pointed out that when doctors joke about left ear surgeons, "we have to check to be sure they don't exist."
In the ten-thousand-hours-themed bestseller Bounce, British journalist Matthew Syed suggested that the British government was failing for a lack of following the Tiger Woods path of unwavering specialization. Moving high-ranking government officials between departments, he wrote, 'is no less absurd than rotating Tiger Woods from golf to baseball to football to hockey."
Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a 'sampling period'. They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
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.
While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger's precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases- as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part - we also need more Rogers; people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
