I've always grown up hearing that you have to be good at one thing.
You hear it everywhere. Podcasts, books, mentors. Pick one skill. Become great at it. That's how you become valuable. That's how you make money. That's how you win.
And I believed that for a long time.
To be fair, in some professions it's obviously true. If you're a doctor, I want you specialized. If you're deep in LLM research, pushing the boundary, depth matters a lot.
But outside of very specific fields, I've started realizing something.
Being a jack of all trades might actually be better.
Especially in business or early stage environments. In the beginning you do everything yourself. Talking to customers, building product, fixing bugs, thinking about distribution, iterating nonstop. Everything is moving fast. It feels like you're not mastering anything.
But at the same time, you are compounding across domains.
You're learning how psychology affects product. How distribution affects growth. How incentives shape behavior. You're constantly switching contexts. And instead of breaking your brain, it actually makes it more flexible.
To me, a generalist isn't someone who is mediocre at everything.
A generalist is someone who can learn new domains fast enough to be useful, and connect domains well enough to make better decisions.
That second part is the real edge.
Pattern recognition.
When you've seen different industries, different systems, different problems, you start seeing similarities. You connect dots faster. You spot leverage faster. You avoid obvious traps because you've seen the pattern somewhere else before.
That's also why I genuinely enjoy talking to people with range.
You don't just learn about one narrow topic. The conversation expands. They pull examples from different fields. They connect ideas you wouldn't normally connect. It feels like their brain has more surface area.
And I've noticed something else.
Specialization is a massive advantage. But it can also trap you.
If your entire identity becomes one field, your thinking can narrow without you noticing. Your incentives lock in. You defend your domain instead of questioning it.
I even worry about this with myself. I'm deeply into fintech right now. I could easily go all in and never look outside it. That's exactly why I deliberately read about healthcare, real estate, energy, psychology. Not because I want to be scattered, but because I don't want my mental models to shrink.
Look at a firm like BlackRock.
They manage trillions. They obviously have deep specialists. Sector analysts. Macro experts. Risk engineers. You need that depth.
But the real leverage sits with the people who can see across asset classes, industries, macro trends, risk systems. The integrators. The ones connecting everything.
It's not specialists versus generalists.
It's specialists coordinated by people who understand the full system.
And in most modern environments, that coordination layer is insanely valuable.
I'm 20. I haven't lived enough to be dogmatic about anything. But right now, if I had to choose between:
someone brilliant at one narrow thing
and someone who can operate across product, psychology, strategy, and people, and learn anything fast
I'm picking the second person.
Not because depth doesn't matter.
But because the person who understands multiple systems can hire the specialist. They can translate between them. They can manage them. They can make better high level decisions because they see more of the board.
In a world where AI is commoditizing execution faster and faster, the ability to learn quickly and connect domains might be the real leverage.
Being a jack of all trades isn't about being unfocused.
It's about being adaptable.
It's about refusing to let your curiosity shrink.
And I'd rather be dangerous in many rooms than impressive in only one.