Keep Switching Jobs? It’s a Good Thing.
Have you been told that it’s about time you settled down? That the job changes you’re making will make you unemployable? That you need to pick something and stick to it already or you’ll never get anywhere in life? I’m here today to tell you that all of that is wrong.
Today I’m talking about the generalists. The ones who get bored doing the same work day in, day out. The ones that have taken unusual or risky career moves or long to do so. The ones whose CVs are a real mix of different things and have so many hobbies that they actually dedicate time and energy to. The ones who keep being made to feel like they’re doing this wrong.
You see the corporate world is looking for specialists. Job advertisements become more and more specific over time. When more of the world has undergraduate degrees, more specialisation is requested. Job specs ask for masters degrees and even PhDs in specific fields. Companies pay premiums for specialists and prior experience in the particular role or field is a must.
But if you’re watching this video, you’re not one of those people and so today I’m going to take aim at some of that self-doubt that eats away at you by telling you exactly why your generalists skills are important and how to make the most of those skills.
In order to do so, I’ve thoroughly read the book Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World. Except I haven’t, I skim read the last two chapters because by that point it was just example after example of the same point over and over again. But I thoroughly read all of the other chapters and today I’m going to use ideas from this book to explore the true value of ADHDers, multipotentialites and, well, generalists.
An understanding of why your generalist skills are so valuable is incredibly important for selling yourself in job interviews.
Part 1: Evidence
I probably don’t even need to motivate you to come up with examples of specialists; experts in their fields who know everything there is to know about their particular topic. The ones Range refers to include Tiger Woods, a golf prodigy from an exceptionally young age, and László Polgár’s chess experiment where he taught his three daughters to become chess experts from a young age, all three of them becoming chess prodigies themselves.
We’ve all heard of the ten thousand hour rule, to become an expert at anything you need to dedicate ten thousand hours of deliberate practise to it. And while it’s true that amazing prodigies exist and there are fantastic specialists out there, it’s not the case that this is the only path to success. Because if specialisation was key then prodigies would dominate every field. But they don’t.
The book starts with a fact about the German National Football team who won the world cup in 2014 and all were late specialisers - they didn’t play more than amateur league until aged 22 or later. I actually almost couldn’t believe this so I went to find the study in question, called “Practice and play in the development of German top-level professional football players” (Hornig et al., 2016)
“National Team differed from amateurs in more non-organised leisure football in childhood, more engagement in other sports in adolescence, later specialisation and in more organised football only at age 22+ years”.
Now you might say that this is a fluke for a counterexample and I could list off other notable examples from Range, but these could all just be counter examples. So let’s go slightly more general here.
We’re going to look at the domain of music, because that’s an area near and dear to me but it’s also an area the book looks at in depth. As a cellist myself, I’m obviously a fan of one of the greatest living cellist right now in Yo-yo Ma, but did not know that in his first year of music education, Yo-yo played the violin, viola, drums and piano before finding his home on the cello and while he did settle on cello at a young age, he had experience playing other instruments before he got there.
Okay so maybe not the best example as he did settle on cello at a young age, he just went through a sampling period super young too - we’ll talk more about the sampling period later, so let’s go to another example.
Range refers to a British boarding school for music that required auditions. When it came to how well the students performed at the audition, they actually found that people who started earlier were actually more likely to be pretty average. Those that were considered to be exceptional were those who spread their effort more evenly across three instruments.
On a personal note I put the book down and did an excited dance when I read this because it literally says the number three and I play three instruments to an advanced standard, so I then went into dreams of grandeur of becoming a top tier musician based on my piano, cello and guitar. Although I am probably too old for that at this point… maybe foreshadowing a later topic here.
The school found the best approach for becoming an excellent musician was to have a sampling period in a breadth of instruments and activities and only narrowing in focus later with increased structure and practice volume after the sampling period. So while Yo-yo Ma was having his sampling period at three years old, maybe I’m just in mine now at thirty.
Moving away from my music daydreams, we’ll look at one more statistic that stuck with me from the first time I read this book shortly after it came out in 2019 and that’s while scientists and members of the public are about equally as likely to have an artistic hobby, scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have an artistic hobby. And those that have won the Nobel prize are 22 times more likely than other scientists to be an amateur actor, dancer, magician or other type of performer.
Let that sink in a second. Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to have an artistic hobby than other scientists. Twenty Two.
There are far more examples than what I’ve given here and absolutely go and read the book for more inspiration and surprising stories.
But it is the case that these individual prodigies like Tiger Woods do still exist, so what’s the difference? Why is golf something prodigies exceed at compared to other realms where they don’t?
Epstein has an answer to this too; that it’s to do with the complexity of the domains. That’s not to say that golf or chess are easy by any stretch of the imagination, but they have, what he calls, kind learning environments where patterns repeat and feedback is accurate and rapid. However most of the real world isn’t that simple. So why does specialisation fall up short here?
Honestly the cello is a gorgeous instrument and I love playing it but I wouldn’t want to give up my piano and guitar in order to do so. So I’m glad I don’t have to!
Part 2: Expertise
So the reason given in Range for specialism not being as effective in more complex scenarios is due to something they call “cognitive entrenchment”. It’s when someone becomes so specialised in their domain that a slight change in circumstances throws them off and they perform significantly worse.
One of the interesting examples shared here is to do with being too close to the situation, or having too much of an “insider view” when it comes to major infrastructure projects. In fact 90% of major infrastructure projects go over budget because managers focus on the details of their project and become overly optimistic.
The book refers to a stat from a PWC subsidiary’s study on tech innovation where it found that there was no statistical significance between R&D spending and performance, with one exception being the bottom 10% who just didn’t invest enough. Spending more money to hire more expert specialists isn’t a key to getting results, you need generalists to integrate the results.
The book is full of example after example of experts getting it wrong in surprising and unintuitive ways because they fall into this cognitive entrenchment trap, so much so that I think at this point I need to pause because I might be making the specialists feel bad here and possibly cause a general mistrust of experts which would be completely something I don’t want to do so I want to step back here and say:
Specialism isn’t a bad thing. We need specialists. They are important. But we can have too much of a good thing. There are places where specialists excel and places where generalists excel and do you know what the best thing is? To combine them both. So specialists, we need you too.
Specialism is an obvious choice because it’s easy to measure, you can put metrics to it. But by forcing everyone into this box, it leads to missing out on the true value generalists and generalist/specialist combinations bring.
Part 3: Education
So why are we ending up in a situation where specialism is highly valued and generalism isn’t? Well Range dedicates a whole chapter on exploring how we learn and I think this has something to do with the answer.
I love how often this book dovetails with my areas of interest because when it goes back to the classroom it talks about maths education, and how we’re generally taught how to do maths by following processes and procedures rather than internalising a deep understanding of the subject.
The problem is that when we have this learning of procedures we don’t get the opportunity to enhance our understanding. It’s easy in the short term - we just do the procedure - but it’s harder in the long term because we don’t internalise deep learning.
Instead to be able to learn something deeply then we need to struggle. We need to become frustrated, we need to get things wrong and learn from our mistakes. In fact, the best ways that we can learn are through spaced repetition, testing and also making connections.
This making connections is incredibly important because this enables us to make abstractions, to transfer concepts from one area to another.
These abstractions are important because they allow us to make analogies and analogies enable us to solve complex problems. In one study, when presented with a complex problem around treating a tumour with dangerous radiation, only 10% of people worked out how to solve it without analogies. After being given an analogy, this tripled to a whopping 30%. When given a second analogy this increased again to 50% and when asked to generalise these analogies it became 80%. That is a huge multiplier on problem solving when using analogies.
Analogies enable us to take the outside view of a problem. When we’re too close to a problem we might end up making false conclusions. Analogies enable us to step back.
The example they use here is of the Netflix algorithm but from my understanding the YouTube algorithm works in a very similar way so we’re going to use it as an example here. Because in order to understand me and what I want to watch, YouTube could create this really complex model to try and understand me. It could attempt to correlate my excitement about music earlier in this video with my excitement about maths just now and build some kind of model to compare the two.
It could try fitting variables to understand how my love of guinea pigs means that I click on a Jiu Jitsu YouTube video and it could use increasingly complex data that it knows about me specifically to trial and error its way through finding things that I want to watch so it can make money from showing me ads.
That sounds like an incredibly difficult problem to solve. The only way I know how to link Guinea Pigs and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is through AuDHD hyperfixations and special interests so it would have to model that part about me too. But what if it just didn’t? What if it used analogies instead?
Because it can use an analogy of comparing me to someone else, to seeing how they behave, what decisions they make of what to watch. And by sampling the viewing habits of people similar to me - people who are analogous to me - it can more accurately pinpoint videos that I might want to watch. It doesn’t always get it right, but it did diagnose me with ADHD before I stumbled across my own diagnosis myself, and if you’d like to know a little more about that you can watch my video, How YouTube diagnosed me with ADHD, via the link in the top corner.
So analogies are super important when it comes to problem solving which is fundamental in a complex world such as the one that we live in. And one of the ways in which we can improve our analogies is through building conceptual thinking through struggling. But there’s also something else important and I’m going to read you a direct quote from the book here, it says:
“Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is the more contexts in which something is learned the more the learner creates abstract models and the less they rely on any particular example”
So in order to make more abstractions, we need to learn in more contexts.
Look at these sweeties! Who doesn’t love some guinea pig content in their blog post? They’re just the most adorable fluffy potatoes!
Part 4: Experimentation
I’m almost loath to bring her up given all the controversy around her, but setting aside all of the politics she’s so incredibly wrapped up in and the effect they’ve had on her reputation, you can’t deny that J.K. Rowling is an incredibly successful author. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, a book that was fundamental to my childhood, was published on the 26th of July 1997, when J.K. Rowling herself was just turning 32 years old, the catalyst to her ultimate success creating a monolithic media franchise that has made her a huge household name and a tun of cash.
But it’s not because of Harry Potter that Range uses her as an example in the book. It’s because before Harry Potter was published, Rowling had a patchy career. She worked a number of temp jobs, moving around and out of the country, never seeming to settle on a particular career path before her writing took off. In fact, her career as we know it now started much older than we’re told to plan for. As a fresh thirty-something I think I can say that I’ve accepted that when you’re in your thirties you’re not a young adult anymore, you’re just an adult.
So Rowling was a late starter (although I would argue 32 is still young!). But she’s far from the only one. My teenage crush of Harrison Ford (I just really loved Han Solo and Indiana Jones) tried to become an actor after taking a class in his senior college year but pivoted to become a self-taught carpenter, famously landing his starring role that changed his life at 35 years old.
Recently I stumbled across a short here on YouTube of Rick Beato talking about his success found at a later age as he dotted around the music industry doing an incredibly and impressive range of music jobs before starting his youtube channel in his 50s!
These are individual examples of people who found success later in life. But they’re not the exceptions, not successful despite starting later in life. Their success became because they’re later in life, and the things that they did before.
Range refers to a study of high achievers where the goal was to examine people fulfilled and successful who arrived via an unconventional route and set out to find candidates for the study. Their initial expectation was that about one in five people they spoke to would have an unusual story to tell. They didn’t expect to find that nearly every single one was.
In many ways, it’s almost ridiculous that we’re sent into this world as teens and young adults and expected to make decisions that will be pivotal to our long term careers, to the rest of our lives. If you think back to when you were seventeen years old, deciding whether or not to go to university, what to study if you went or what job to get if you didn’t. Are you the same person now?
We change over time as we grow and mature. Our personality often changes more than we expect and shows up differently in different contexts. This makes it almost impossible to make and see through long term goals, yet that’s what we try to do and feel bad about the fact that those long term goals didn’t work out for us, or that we couldn’t come up with a long term goal at all.
Range looks at the situation of university here in the UK where in England and Wales we specialise super early - by the time I got to my final exams I was sitting just maths, further maths and physics before studying straight maths at university - whereas in Scotland, things stay more general.
Turns out, while I thought my career switch made me the exception, actually university graduates in England and Wales were far more likely to change career fields completely than Scottish graduates and our cultures aren’t different enough for that to be the deciding factor.
Because what we are missing when we specialise too early is that sampling period that I referred to way back when I was talking about music.
So it makes sense that you switch. You didn’t get chance to go through that sampling period, to try out jobs that worked for you because you had to put on your adult trousers and pick a career and work towards it. The problem is, as per Hermina Ibarra, we learn who we are by living, and not before.
Whether you’re someone who switches jobs regularly or not, big changes, particularly switching industry, are scary. We’re often told not to risk it, to keep the new area as a hobby - I’ve been told exactly that about coaching by the way, to keep it as a hobby and not chance it being part of my career. But moves in the end committed to it, tried it out and adjusted accordingly.
And in fact, a Freakonomics experiment found that those who were pondering a job change that went through with it and switched were substantially happier six months on, despite what might be an initial financial penalty caused by the switch.
And actually, part of what inspired me to make this video is because of the struggle so many of us ADHDers go through in the workplace. The regular job changes, the patchy work history, the struggle to feel we’ve landed in the right place. We get shamed for quitting when actually quitting doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Range posits two reasons as to why we might quit a role or a venture. The first reason is a lack of persistence. It’s hard so I’m giving up. The second is a lack of match, that this role or venture doesn’t fit anymore and we’re going elsewhere in search of a better one. In the latter case, quitting isn’t a bad thing. It means we’re progressing on the sampling period, learning and looking for our better match.
Experimentation is fundamentally hard and it’s fundamentally hard because with any experiment there’s going to be a lot of failure. I very publicly fail all the time when I put out YouTube videos that don’t do as well as I’d like yet, or when I try a new marketing technique for my business that is met with crickets. Failure is a part of experimentation, and that’s what makes experimentation hard, what makes it feel bad and frustrating.
But although experimentation comes with a lot of failures, it also gives opportunity for success, for finding that opportunity that makes the difference, for moving beyond “eh this is okay” to “this is what real success looks like”. So we’re sampling, we’re experimenting and we’re learning because all of these generalist activities lead to our ultimate success.
Anyone else spend their childhood secretly hoping for their Hogwarts letter?
Part 5: Extrapolation
Whenever I read a book in the businessy self-helpy psychology style world I always have neurodivergence in the back of my mind, looking to make a connection I wouldn’t have made before my diagnosis, and I think there are a few important things that I want to highlight on this topic.
The first is actually a much wider point on diversity. Range is full of many, many examples of situations where expertise alone fails where experience from different domains wins, and in many of these examples that breadth of experience doesn’t actually come from just one person. It comes from teams who have diverse backgrounds, situations where people unlike the rest of the group have a voice at the table.
Now I know the corporate world has accepted that diversity is important, whether it behaves in line with that thought or not, but I think it shows even more clearly here how important diversity is because different backgrounds create more generalist teams that are more likely to solve problems.
The book does imply that a single person with more general experience is more powerful than spreading it over a team, but then that person has general experience due to diversity; their diversity of experiences, of learning, and I think a particularly powerful form of diversity here is, you guessed it, neurodiversity.
At one point the book talks about Alternative Uses Tasks and how challenging people to perform at these alternative uses tasks encourages creativity, enabling analogies, abstraction and conceptual thinking.
When I think of alternative use tasks, I immediately think of the power we neurospicies have when it comes to divergent thinking. The amount of oddball ideas that we generate because our brains have this inbuilt capacity to come up with wacky ideas that sit well outside the norm.
When I combine that with the ADHD curiosity, the ADHD need for variety, hyperfixations, a natural draw to collecting knowledge from a huge range of different locations, I immediately see how ADHD can have a huge benefit to being a successful generalist.
So what does that mean for you watching, the ADHDer or multipotentialite who clicked on this video because they are a generalist? Well here are the things that I’m taking forward to incorporate into my own career going forward:
Changing jobs, roles or industries is not a bad thing. It’s part of experimentation, it’s part of sampling. And as long as we’re doing it for that reason rather than just giving up because it’s hard, then we can use that as part of developing our breadth to keep honing our transferable generalist skills.
You are not too old. You’re just not. Even if you’re a retiree right now and not interested in rebooting your career, you’re not too old to do something that you feel proud of, to use your amazing generalist skills in a way that personally satisfies you.
And for my third takeaway, I don’t really have a way to say it that’s better than Range itself so I’m going to leave you on a quote, and that is.
“Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted”.
References:
Range: How Generalists Triumph In A Specialised World, (Epstein, 2019)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
Want to see more?
Sign up with your email address to receive the latest thoughts on neurodivergent careers and leadership.