I’ve been listening to Founders podcast a lot, and the host recently mentioned a thought he’s learned from Naval that made me think about specialization vs generalization.

“Economic development specializes functions, differentiates ability, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. Remember, the more complex a civilization gets, the more you’ll see inequality, so economic inequality, right? So the way Navarre has had influence on my thinking about this is he says something like, we’re living in the age of infinite leverage, right? And in the age of infinite leverage, it is more important to be at the extreme of your craft, at the extreme of your work. Why? Because the person that is the, he says the person that is the best in the world at what they do gets to do it for everyone. In the age of infinite leverage, we should see this idea that economic development specializes functions, differentiates ability, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. We should see that only continue to expand and become more important. That’s why a few years ago, I wrote to my own self, learn and optimize for this.”

That’s a lot of text. But there is an interesting idea in there. In fact Nassim Taleb explored the same concept in the Black Swan when he described Extremistan and Mediocristan.

Extremistan is a place where things tend to fall into two polar extremes: either something is high impact, or it is low impact.

The internet makes the world more like extremistan, because you either have a massive audience, or you have no audience. You either have a massive number of customers, or you have no customers.

The world is big enough to support many small to medium niches, but on a marketplace as efficient as the internet most things will end up quite extreme.

Therefore we have to ask ourselves the question: are we better off being a generalist or a specialist?

A generalist can do a lot of different things, and will be hired if someone in their network needs help that they can solve. But they won’t be hired for jobs that can hire off the internet. For any such job, a more extreme specialist will be better.

But everyone can’t be the best in their field? That’s true. But skills are not interchangeable between practitioners. One juggler might be replaceable with another juggler, but two programmers might know of different ways to solve a problem.

A better metaphor for how this works is the skill stack popularised by Scott Adams in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (affiliate link).

Skill stacking means that you build more than one skill, and become the best in the world with that specific combination of skills.

According to Claude 3.5 Sonnet some examples of this are:

• a graphic designer who is also a great writer
• a software engineer who is also a great product manager
• a chef who is also a great baker
• a photographer who is also a great writer
• a programmer who is also a great marketer

And I hope you get the idea. Even though I doubt you’ll get far with just 2 skills in your stack.

My conclusion has to be that to compete on the internet you have to be a specific generalist. A generalist who is the best in the world at a combination of skills.

So pick the thing you are interested in and get unreasonably good at it. Then move on to another area of interest. And so on. Keep stacking those skills.