Be comb shaped

You've heard about the T-shaped professional. Having a breadth of surface level knowledge and skill in various areas and depth of skill and knowledge in one specific area. For example, a T-shaped designer may know a little bit about visual design and UX research but be super skilled at Interaction Design. Or so the story goes.

Some people also talk about it from an industry point of view. Or discipline point of view. So the vertical part of the “T” would be being a super skilled designer and the horizontal part could be other adjacent disciplines or disciplines you work closely with such as front end development skills, data analysis etc.

You've probably also heard of niching down and specialising versus being a generalist. Both tracks have their merits and potential pitfalls. If you're specialised at only one thing, you may become in very high demand but at the same time, drastic changes in your field could mean you grasping at the air to figure out your next move. If you're a generalist, you may not be able to capitalise greatly and be differentiated from others.

You've also probably heard the saying jack of all trades, master of none. I hate that saying. I've always hated it. As someone who's very curious and have always had diverse interests, it felt like a personal attack. Pick one thing and be serious about it. Like it was impossible for someone to be interested in and skilled at multiple things.

People often default to the 10,000 hour rule popularised by Malcolm Gladwell as a way to say you can’t be very good at more than one thing or that if you practice hard enough and keep practicing, you’ll be among the best of the best. But that idea has been found to be untrue, and more than once.

I personally prefer the idea of a Renaissance person or multipotentialite or like I put it “a comb shaped person”. Or, more accurately, a broken comb. The idea is that there are multiple things you could learn and become skilled at to varying degrees of expertise. This is not new. People have been doing this for a very long time. I remember reading in my historical fiction novels, and then later learning about real life people (like Leonardo da Vinci, Mary Somerville, Isaac Newton, Africanus Horton, Hypatia) who were instructed and skilled in multiple sciences, languages, and artistic endeavours. People were expected to be well rounded and knowledgeable across multiple disciplines.

I like my idea of the “Broken Comb Professional” because it accommodates the idea that a person can be interested in and skilled at many many things. And to varying degrees of proficiency. This could be languages, it could be a specific artistic skill, it could be data science, it could be history, music, science and so on. The important thing is that we recognise that humans can be and do more than one thing, and do many of them very well.

Yes, maybe there are areas where we want someone to be focused on one thing and one thing only and maybe there are people who do that and like that and want to be that. But if that’s not what you want, that’s okay too. There’s value in learning across disciplines because it can give you a broader world view and you can discover new and interesting ways to connect disciplines that other people may not be able to.

Interesting Links

• Does focusing on systemic issues create a victim mentality

• My dinner with Mr Patrick

• You’re only as good as your worst day

• Committing to your craft

• Mathematics and sex (YouTube)

• The best morning routine (YouTube; episode 101(!) of my podcast)