I had only dipped my toe into research on specialization in the wider world of work, so in my talk to the small group of military veterans I mostly stuck to sports. I touched on the other findings only briefly, but the audience seized on it. All were late specializers or career changers, and as they filed up one after another to introduce themselves after the talk, I could tell that all were at least moderately concerned, and some were borderline ashamed of it.
They had been brought together by the Pat Tillman Foundation, which, in the spirit of the late NFL player who left a professional football career to become an Army Ranger, provides scholarships to veterans, active-duty military, and military spouses who are undergoing career changes or going back to school. They were all scholarship recipients, former paratroopers and translators who were becoming teachers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They brimmed with enthusiasm, but rippled with an undercurrent of fear. Their LinkedIn profiles didn’t show the linear progression toward a particular career they had been told employers wanted. They were anxious starting grad school alongside younger (sometimes much younger) students, or changing lanes later than their peers, all because they had been busy accumulating inimitable life and leadership experiences. Somehow, a unique advantage had morphed in their heads into a liability.
A few days after I spoke to the Tillman Foundation group, a former Navy SEAL who came up after the talk emailed me: “We are all transitioning from one career to another. Several of us got together after you had left and discussed how relieved we were to have heard you speak.” I was slightly bemused to find that a former Navy SEAL with an undergraduate degree in history and geophysics pursuing graduate degrees in business and public administration from Dartmouth and Harvard needed me to affirm his life choices. But like the others in the room, he had been told, both implicitly and explicitly, that changing directions was dangerous.
The talk was greeted with so much enthusiasm that the foundation invited me to give a keynote speech at the annual conference in 2016, and then to small group gatherings in different cities. Before each occasion, I read more studies and spoke with more researchers and found more evidence that it takes time—and often forgoing a head start—to develop personal and professional range, but it is worth it.
I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.
Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.
Zuckerberg was twenty-two when he said that. It was in his interest to broadcast that message, just as it is in the interest of people who run youth sports leagues to claim that year-round devotion to one activity is necessary for success, never mind evidence to the contrary. But the drive to specialize goes beyond that. It infects not just individuals, but entire systems, as each specialized group sees a smaller and smaller part of a large puzzle.
One revelation in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis was the degree of segregation within big banks. Legions of specialized groups optimizing risk for their own tiny pieces of the big picture created a catastrophic whole. To make matters worse, responses to the crisis betrayed a dizzying degree of specialization-induced perversity. A federal program launched in 2009 incentivized banks to lower monthly mortgage payments for homeowners who were struggling but still able to make partial payments. A nice idea, but here’s how it worked out in practice: a bank arm that specialized in mortgage lending started the homeowner on lower payments; an arm of the same bank that specialized in foreclosures then noticed that the homeowner was suddenly paying less, declared them in default, and seized the home. “No one imagined silos like that inside banks,” a government adviser said later. Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
Highly specialized health care professionals have developed their own versions of the “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem. Interventional cardiologists have gotten so used to treating chest pain with stents—metal tubes that pry open blood vessels—that they do so reflexively even in cases where voluminous research has proven that they are inappropriate or dangerous. A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting, when thousands of cardiologists were away; the researchers suggested it could be because common treatments of dubious effect were less likely to be performed.
An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there. The scientist is taking it upon himself to attempt to despecialize the training of future researchers; he hopes that eventually it will spread to training in every field. He profited immensely from cultivating range in his own life, even as he was pushed to specialize. And now he is broadening his purview again, designing a training program in an attempt to give others a chance to deviate from the Tiger path. “This may be the most important thing I will ever do in my life,” he told me.
I hope this book helps you understand why.
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When the Tillman Scholars spoke of feeling unmoored, and worried they were making a mistake, I understood better than I let on. I was working on a scientific research vessel in the Pacific Ocean after college when I decided for sure that I wanted to be a writer, not a scientist. I never expected that my path from science into writing would go through work as the overnight crime reporter at a New York City tabloid, nor that I would shortly thereafter be a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, a job that, to my own surprise, I would soon leave. I began worrying that I was a job-commitment-phobic drifter who must be doing this whole career thing wrong. Learning about the advantages of breadth and delayed specialization has changed the way I see myself and the world. The research pertains to every stage of life, from the development of children in math, music, and sports, to students fresh out of college trying to find their way, to midcareer professionals in need of a change and would-be retirees looking for a new vocation after moving on from their previous one.