{"id":243,"date":"2002-07-11T11:17:58","date_gmt":"2002-07-11T16:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/uncategorized\/generalist-or-specialist"},"modified":"2019-12-30T20:40:37","modified_gmt":"2019-12-31T02:40:37","slug":"generalist-or-specialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/intj\/generalist-or-specialist\/","title":{"rendered":"Generalist or Specialist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always considered myself a generalist, a person with a wide range of interests who stops in at the entrance to a subject, peeks inside, notes the inhabitants, and moves on. At our last lunch together, MDM recommended I Could Do Anything: If I Only Knew What It Was<\/a>. Reading Chapter 6, in which Barbara Sher discusses scanners (generalists) and divers (specialists, made me wonder if I’m really a specialist after all. She describes the case of the odd diver who behaves like a scanner–a specialist who is afraid of committing to a specialization.<\/p>\n

\nI do enjoy learning everything I can about a subject. When I worked at the IRS, I knew the IRC like no one else in my unit. I knew what page in Pub 17 you could find the list of the 8 community property states. I knew the obscure code for entering a foreign address. And I loved summarizing my knowledge and sharing it with others. Those are the traits that got me into documentation and training.<\/p>\n

\nWhen I study Japanese, I look up words in four or five books. I look up the English to Japanese and then I look up the Japanese to English. I look up the Japanese meaning in a Japanese dictionary. I look up the kanji and the etymology. I compare the word to similar words and I contrast it in books on usage. No wonder it takes me so long to learn one word!<\/p>\n

\nWhen I began gardening, I read everything I could. I loved to open three books at once and compare their descriptions of the same plant.<\/p>\n

\nOn reflection, I think I always thought of myself as a generalist, because I always feel like a beginner<\/a>. Although I like being an expert in whatever I’m doing, I don’t like being the<\/strong> expert. I prefer to surround myself with people who know more than I. Also once I feel I’ve mastered something, I get bored with it. I’ve had jobs that made other people wonder how I could stick with them for so long. But as long as there was something new to learn, I could sustain my interest.<\/p>\n

\nI’ve answered my own question: I’m a specialist. I’ve not committed to a specialty, not because I’m afraid of commitment, but because I have to choose subjects that aren’t easily mastered (like Japanese!) or my attention wanders.<\/p>\n

\nAnother reason I have always believed I was a generalist is that I’m a proponent of interdisciplinary studies. And I have chosen many jobs where I’m the bridge between two specialists, or the bridge between a specialist and a non-specialist. Because I understood only enough of these specialites to bridge them–because I was never as expert as the expert, I concluded I was a generalist.<\/p>\n

\nThose of you who know me, which do you think I am? And what are you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surfing or diving?<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4406,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/4406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/wordsintobytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}