Why General Knowledge Is Only Useful as a Hobby
How much do you know if you’re a graphic designer, airline pilot, heart surgeon or personnel manager? A whole lot. Your brain is humming with facts about your area of expertise. Even if you’re still in the early stages of your career, you probably already know more than your predecessors ever did. Pilots no longer simply have to master aerodynamics and a range of analog instruments. Every year they’re confronted with new technologies and aviation rules with which they have to be familiar—in addition to the old ones. Graphic designers must be conversant not only with software packages like Photoshop and InDesign but also with the last fifty years of esthetics in advertising. Otherwise they run the risk of recycling old ideas or, worse still, of not being able to keep up. New software comes onto the market annually and is adopted in offices, as clients become increasingly demanding, requiring designers to produce videos and master social media, videos, and virtual reality.
What about outside your area of expertise? Do you know more or less than your predecessors? Less, I’d imagine. How could it be otherwise? Your brain has only limited capacity, and the more you fill it with things from your specialist area the less space remains for general knowledge. Perhaps you’re protesting indignantly. Me, a one-trick pony? Nobody wants to be one of those. We’d rather call ourselves generalists, curators (the author’s description of choice) or networkers. We gush about how wide-ranging our job is, how diverse our portfolio of clients, how exciting every new project. We all see ourselves as versatile, not as blinkered specialists.
Yet when you look at the infinite number of specialized fields—from designing computer chips to trading in cocoa beans—our presumed universe of knowledge suddenly shrinks to a tiny niche. We know more and more about less and less. To put it another way, as our expertise gradually increases, our general ignorance practically explodes. In order to survive, we’re reliant on countless other niche workers, who rely in their turn on other niche workers. Or do you think you’d be able to quickly cobble yourself together a new mobile phone?
These niches are sprouting out of the ground like mushrooms. The inordinate speed at which they multiply is a first in human history. The only division of labor that has existed for millions of years is between men and women, and then merely because of the plain biological circumstance that men are generally bigger and stronger—and that women have to go through pregnancy. If we could observe our ancient forebears living and working fifty thousand years ago, we’d be surprised by how good nearly all of them were at nearly everything. There were no specialists in stone ax design, stone ax production, stone ax marketing, stone ax customer support, stone ax training or stone ax community management. There weren’t even people who focused on brandishing them. They all produced their own axes, and they all knew how to use them. Hunters and gatherers didn’t have “professions.”
This didn’t change until around ten thousand years ago, when communities became increasingly settled. Suddenly specialized roles emerged: breeders of livestock, crop farmers, potters, surveyors, kings, soldiers, water-carriers, cooks and scribes. The profession was invented, the career, the field of expertise—and with it, the blinkered nerd.
A Stone Age person could only survive as a generalist. As a specialist they’d have no chance. Now, 10,000 years later, the situation is precisely reversed: people can only survive as specialists, and as generalists they’d have no chance. The remaining generalists—the jacks of all trades, the hack writers among journalists—have seen the value of their craft fall off a cliff. It’s astounding how rapidly a general education has become unusable.
Ten thousand years—from an evolutionary perspective, it’s the blink of an eye. That’s why we still don’t feel fully comfortable in our niches. As the specialists we are now, we feel incomplete and vulnerable, open to attack. As proud as a person might feel of being a call center manager, for instance, he will sometimes feel embarrassed, even ashamed, of the job. He thinks he has to apologize if he doesn’t understand something outside his field of expertise. Yet that’s the most natural thing in the world.
It’s time we stopped romanticizing being a generalist. For ten thousand years the only path to professional success—and to social prosperity—has been through specialization. During that time, however, two things have happened that no one could have foreseen. Globalization fused niches that previously had been geographically separate. A tenor in one city and a tenor in the neighboring city, both of whom had formerly earned a comfortable income and never got in each other’s way, abruptly found themselves in the same—now global—niche, thanks to the advent of recorded disks. All at once, the world no longer needed ten thousand tenors. Three was enough. The “winner takes it all” effect led to stark income inequality. A few victors dominated almost the entire market, while the remaining majority were relegated to scavenging on the periphery.
Something else happened, too. The niches began to subdivide endlessly into sub-niches and sub-sub-niches. The number of specialisms exploded. What previously was regionally separate but professionally integrated is now globally integrated but professionally separate. The competition within fields is huge, the number of those fields equally so. “There’s an infinite number of winners,” Kevin Kelly has said, “as long as you’re not trying to win somebody else’s race.”
What does this mean for you and me? First: often we don’t specialize radically enough, then we react with surprise when other people overtake us. Becoming a radiologist in a hospital, for example, is really only useful these days if you’re going to specialize—as a nuclear radiologist, interventional radiologist, neuroradiologist or the like. So don’t just stick to your field; ask yourself what exactly that field is. This doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally poke your head out of your silo—you can import plenty of useful stuff from other fields by analogy. Just make sure you’re doing it with an eye to your niche, to your own circle of competence (see Chapter 14).
Second: the “winner takes it all” effect will help you out if you’re the best in your niche—and I mean worldwide. If that’s not the case, you’ll have to specialize further. You’ve got to run your own race if you want to emerge the victor.
And, finally, third: stop hoarding all the knowledge you possibly can in the hopes of improving your job prospects. Financially speaking, there’s no longer any benefit to that. These days “accumulating general knowledge” makes sense only as a hobby. So relax and read a book about Stone Age humans, if you’re genuinely interested. Just be careful you don’t become one yourself.