Specialists
It’s most important as a young person to stay focused on the focus of being competent in multiple disciplines to be competitive. From my competitive view, specialists as a whole — from engineers to lawyers to medical doctors — tend to know more about less. Therefore, specialists don’t have as much of a competitive advantage as it may seem from their social presentation. Specializations work very well for social currency, especially when it comes to impressing people that have no clue what exactly a specialist is doing. It’s like me telling people I’m a drummer. When the majority hear that I’m a drummer, you can see in their face that their reference points are only what they know (which is often far from what is actually happening in the world of the drums). To be specific, most listeners cannot identify what exactly they hear, much less how it’s played or the intricacies of listening to all other instruments and vocals and placing the beat into the infrastructure of a song. The same goes for surfing, violin, skateboarding, and many other specialties that appear to be easy to understand in general. The irony ensues when any individuals attempt to do what they feel they generally understand. Only at that point does an unfamiliar level of humility take place where the individual realizes that what they are viewing generally takes much more skill, determination, time, efficiency, intrinsic talent, and an unreasonable amount of natural spatial reasoning than one would ever assume.
It is important as a society that we stop putting so much emphasis as fans on judgment, attempting to mimic that which is outside one’s circle of competence (which leads to unfounded confidence), as well as comparisons that are based on complete delusion (which often disguises itself in the form of obsession). Obsession lacks balance and perspective. Something we all lack as human beings is the action of doing the best we can in this complex state of being. While we will never be able to change our Behavioral RNA™️, we can always improve what is expressed when we as a society learn how to respect before we need to be humbled and put in our place. Before false calibration with comparison, jealousy, and the most powerful motivation of the world: ENVY. Envy is quiet, meek, calm, sophisticated, and ever-present with those that don’t know themselves.
One should learn not only to be a specialist in this life but to expand their circle of competence beyond specialty as the world has many running parts that require adaptability first, second, and third. Without being adaptable, intelligence has little significance on the whole. A drummer without an understanding of song structure and the musicians with whom they work is limited in their ability to make and play music. A neurologist without an understanding of not only how the brain works but how it interfaces with all bodily functions (and vice versa) is limited in their ability to care for patients and can actually do harm.
One must make sure to not be so specialized that their contribution to humanity ends up being less than the sum of the parts brought to the table. While it has always been about winning for me, in my particular case, winning, in my competitive view, is and will always be in direct proportion to its duality. One doesn’t factually win if both sides do not win. Being a specialist of any kind must involve the other side, which is an understanding of the general aspects of life, its content, and its infrastructure in terms of the general population, not the specialized.
What is your specialty?
