Prodigal Thoughts

Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash

One of the enduring memories of the past twenty years and some of work is getting hauled into my Supervisor’s office for a career chat. At the time I was twenty three, fresh off a year of national service quite literally in the middle of nowhere and two weeks into my first proper job. My Supervisor on the other hand was a stern, no-frills expat, fresh off an assignment in South East Asia, who fit the dour Scotsman stereotype to a tee, complete with a Protestant work ethic. Prior to said year of national service, I had spent most of growing up in a small town, in a small Nigerian state, the intricacies of corporate life being as alien to me as it would be to a small town boy in a King’s court.

The job was as one of five new hires, four of us fresh graduates. It was at one of the oil & gas exploration companies in the country and paid more in that first year than what my father – a 30 year University Professor at the time – earned. It was, to put it mildly, the very definition of life changing money. Over time, it would come out that someone in the great corporate behemoth had the idea to recruit fresh grads for the first time in nearly a decade, the intent being to organically develop talent for a change rather than poach from elsewhere.

The chat boiled down to one question – what path I was interested in pursuing over my putative career with the company. As I recall it, he leaned back in his chair, hands on his head and proceeded to describe a parable of ladders, one technical and one managerial. The choice before me was between being a specialist or a generalist. My choice that day was to be a specialist, the allure of a niche specialty, being a purveyor of somewhat esoteric knowledge, and the one example I knew being some of the things which predisposed me to that choice.

The generalist v. specialist debate is one which continues to simmer, presumably for the very reason that there are pros and cons to both. In perhaps the most popular book on the subject, Range, David Epstein weighs in on the side of the generalists, concluding that people who think broadly(generalists) have an inherent advantage over experts (specialists) in a world where computers (LLMs perhaps?) are eating the world. AI and the “death” of expertise is relevant in this regard.

At first glance Cal Newport, of the Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You fame appears to fly the flag for specialists. A deeper look however suggests things might be a bit more nuanced than that, particularly when viewed through the lens of career capital and the five habits of a craftsman he espouses.

It seems to me therefore, that it is perhaps not an either or question, but a both and one, one which must necessarily take into account the intersection of the individual, their personality and the opportunities available at any given time. In my case, my Enneagram 5/ INTJ type lends itself to a motivation for knowledge, hence the joy I have derived from a deep, somewhat niche specialty. Being somewhat introverted has also been a consideration, as being a specialist has led me down the Independent Contributor route, rather than a supervisory/ managerial one.

My niche specialty has also opened doors across multiple continents, enabling to some extent the luxury of being prodigal. With the benefit of twenty years and a bit under my belt, that decision appears to have been a good (if not the right) one. I wonder though, if that will remain the case over the next twenty.