Our culture rewards excellence in a specialized domain:the fastest runner, the laser-focused tech entrepreneur, the sub-specialist surgeon. Some athletes like Simone Biles and Johannes Klaebo buck the trend and dominate across disciplines, but in general, who remembers the decathaletes? They’re forgotten in favor of the 100m sprinters.
Identity is easy to construct around specialization. I am an ultrarunner. I am a liver transplant surgeon. I am a pilot. A single specialization carries associated traits that are simple enough to adopt for oneself and for others to understand. The ultrarunner is wiry, athletic, good at suffering. The pilot is detail-oriented, procedurally focused, systematic.
Though it is a dominant self-concept model, the specialist is a subject to under appreciated pitfalls.
Comparison is a pitfall for the specialist. Even in very specialized fields, like olympic caliber skimo, or interventional radiology, there is still a large worldwide talent pool, and only the top few will receive recognition as the leaders in their field. There are three podium spots, but 106 men started the 2020 Tokyo olympic marathon. The other 103 weren’t good enough, despite untold hours of training. The specialist who is not recognized as a leader may forever compare themselves to those higher on the recognition or status ladder and find themselves wanting.
Diversity is a pitfall for the specialist, or rather, lack of it. No sound investment strategy relies on a single asset. The risk is too high. Identify too closely with a single specialization (I am an ultra-runner) and identity can disintegrate after a single big insult (torn achilles tendon). Who is the ultra-runner who cannot run?
Obsolescence is a pitfall for the specialist. Without a doubt the world has been host to the world’s greatest horse-buggy driver, film-camera repair specialist, and currently, the world’s finest radiologists. Specialization becomes a bet that doesn’t pay off when the ground shifts under your feet and a new paradigm emerges. The deeper the specialization, the less transferrable the skills.
Diminishing returns is a pitfall for the specialist. The effort, cost, time, and personal investment required to gain an additional 1% proficiency from 98% to 99% in a domain is probably in the neighborhood of 1,000,000x the investment required to get from 5% to 10%. While the specialist grinds for a tiny residual margin, a generalist, a polyvalent, can gain huge gains cheaply across multiple domains.
Polyvalence is an under-appreciated alternative to specialization. I define the polyvalent person as one who bridges at least 3 domains in which others specialize. While they never measure up to a high-level specialist in any one of those fields, they gain resilience to the pitfalls of specialization while also creating specialization of a different sort– cross domain knowledge.
A polyvalent is easy to discount. In no one field is a polyvalent a standout. The specialist always feels comfortable judging the polyvalent because the specialist can always reassure themselves of their superiority in their speciality. We struggle to rank a polyvalent, or to define excellence in polyvalnce, because it’s hard to decide what to measure.
I think that for most people, polyvalence is a superior strategy to specialization. In a world of 7 billion+ people, distinguishing oneself through specialization is increasingly difficult and requires potentially absurd degrees of specialization. How many patients need a pediatric craniofacial neuro-ophthalmologist? Instead, take high-proficiency knowledge across disparate domains, combine it, and you may find yourself in a completely unique position. Study physics, develop a passion for crochet, and get nerdy about mountain bikes, and you may find yourself applying crochet patterns to nanotubule construction suitable to light and resilient bike construction. And you will be alone there, in a good way.
A polyvalent’s identity is also resilient. Failure or setback in a domain still leaves at least 2/3rds of the polyvalent’s identity unchallenged. If access to a domain totally disappears, it can potentially be replaced with a new domain leading to new and interesting results.
The reason that most people still aim for specialization is that we publicly celebrate specialists, and the path to polyvalence feels unclear. We ask our kids “what do you want to be when you grow up” because the answers are cute, but in the same moment we unintentionally teach them that they should “be” a single, simple answer to that question. Fireman. Astronaut. Or as one of the kids said at my son’s preschool recently, Gas Station Attendant.
A litmus test for whether polyvalence would be a better strategy for you: Are you excited to learn a new discipline, accelerating rapidly and gaining new skills quickly? Does that interest wane as you approach the 80-90th percentile proficiency in that field? Would you rather learn three new skills than perfect one? You may be suited to a polyvalent approach.
It took me a long time to reframe my own path this way, and I suspect that’s common. A polyvalent’s niche only makes sense in retrospect. You can’t know in advance which domains will pay off, because it’s the wandering itself — the learning, the cross-pollination — that shapes the niche you eventually fit. Trying to predict the winning combination in advance is just specialization wearing a disguise. Better to chase what’s interesting now and trust the process. The path only connects looking backward. And if it never connects at all? You spent your years learning things you loved. That may have been the whole point.