Episode 50: Mini-Series- Generalist Vs Specialist

The One Percent Project- Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Resilience

Generalist Vs Specialist:

This mini-episode stemmed from my discussion with Sidu Ponnappa. Sidu is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He says the generalist Vs specialist discussion is misleading. It is better to analyse someone as objective-oriented or activity oriented. One can choose either not both at the same time.

These days there is a debate, especially among the younger talent pool, about being a generalist or a specialist. There is a popular book on this topic by David Epstein called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Epstein argues against specialisation early on in one's life and makes a case for "Range" to gather as many skills and experiences as you can and later to specialise based on your strengths.

What got me thinking is, does the brain have a generalist vs specialist evolution, and do Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Michael Angelo, and other achievers have a generalist or a specialist mindset? It turns out that the brain goes through a generalist and specialist evolution cycle between early childhood and adulthood.

A child is born with 100 billion neurons. These neurons communicate with each other through a structure called synapse. During infancy, the brain experiences a large amount of growth. As a result, there is an explosion of synapse formation between neurons during early brain development. This is called synaptogenesis.

Synapse growth is critical in learning, memory formation, and adaptation early in life. Around 2 to 3 years of age, the number of synapses hits a peak. Just after this peak, the brain starts to remove synapses that it no longer needs. A synapse can either be strengthened or weakened based on its use. Synapses that are frequently used grow and strengthen and the ones which are not used are removed by the brain. The process of removing synapses is called Synaptic pruning.

Going back to our business world, the brain begins its journey as a generalist, adds as many synapses as it can early on and then switches to a specialist mode where it starts pruning, killing, synapses that show low or no use. If you consider the journeys of Warren Buffet, who made his first investment at the age of 11, Bill Gates, by the age of 19, had more than 10,000 hours of coding under his belt, Michael Angelo became an artist by the age of 13 and there a numerous such examples of high achievers who started honing their crafts in their teens.

David Epstein talks about Roger Freder as a generalist because he dabbled into skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer at school. It was closer to his teens that Roger picked up tennis. Maybe this is an example of synaptic pruning where the brain kills the less used synapses.

Now can you and I pick up tennis in our twenties or thirties? Sure we can! But it will potentially be 5 times harder than someone who has worked on their serve and backhand since early childhood. Our schooling system pushes us to be a generalist when it should provide us with the environment in our teens to be a specialist and focus on activities and subjects we enjoy. We can't say for sure if synaptogenesis is a generalist function or synapse pruning is a specialist function of the brain. Still, it does indicate that the brain's development has a generalist to specialist evolution cycle.

I found the topic valuable not only to get a better understanding of my strengths and weakness but also the formative process that my little one is going through.

If you like this mini-episode, share it with someone who would find it valuable. You can drop me a line at [e-mail]. Until next time.