Go deep or go home? Why breadth isn't the enemy of specialty
TLDR; There is a time for hyper-focus, and there is a time for diffuse awareness.
The worlds of academia and business have something in common. In both worlds, specialists win.
To be taken seriously, to get the funding, to make an impact, academics and businesspeople must go deep into an area of expertise.
So it’s probably no wonder that the breadth of my interests, experience and expertise has often felt a bit shameful to me.
Not to say I haven’t specialized in some ways. I certainly have. With my consulting firm, I doubled down on helping enterprise technology companies with strategies and writing for their content programs. In graduate school, I spent the first half focused on the impact of generative AI on strategic communication; which led to insights around what is happening with trust in communication; which then led to a lengthy research project with the goal of uncovering the best way to teach these findings to college-educated professionals.
But if you look at my bookshelves (which take up the walls of literally every room in my house except the bathrooms and kitchen), or you poke around in my Roam Research note graph, you’ll find hundreds of other topics that have captured my attention in my lifetime.
And when I read something from a true expert who has gone deep on their topic, I sometimes feel that twinge of shame. Maybe I should stop scattering my attention so much and just find “the thing” to be known for.
But then someone will say something to me in conversation, and I’ll pull out from my brain a random bit of information from a totally unrelated book I read — and it completely shifts the person’s perspective.
Or my team and I will be stuck on a business challenge, and I’ll remember that thing I learned about Jung’s studies of synchronicity that just happens to crack the problem wide open.
Or I’ll get a newsletter in my inbox with an article that gives me a sense of déjà vu — and sure enough, when I look through my notes, I find the original source of that information, and it spurs me to write something that clarifies the topic.
It seems around every corner there is a reminder that breadth isn’t bad.
In fact, breadth can lead to greater innovation when it is combined with pattern recognition, because you’re able to connect things that no one else has.
David Epstein began a similar conversation in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. But I don’t think that conversation has gone nearly far enough.
What if we encouraged people not just to specialize, but to find the problem they want to help solve right now?
Some people would naturally specialize in order to tackle a problem. Others would go broad to explore different avenues of solving a problem.
I see this as the difference between hyper-focus and diffuse awareness.
And in this world, both are equally important.
When I’m coaching writers (professional and otherwise), I often find that helping them get focused is the most important thing. It cuts down their overwhelm and gives them momentum.
Sometimes, though, it’s more helpful to a writer when I can help them break out of a sticky spot by going broad — when we can find a radically different story to tell to bring the topic to life.
Depth and breadth. Each have their place.
Mostly, in this Substack, you’re going to find breadth and a sense of diffuse awareness. You’re going to find seemingly off-the-wall book recommendations, strange tidbits of information from odd sources, and surprising relationships between disparate topics. (All in the service of helping you build trust through written communication, of course.)
But my hope is that you’ll come away with brand new connections in your mind, fresh ways of looking at old problems, and perspective shifts galore.
And I’ll leave the specializing to the specialists.