Quotes About Specialization

The increase of knowledge has forced the thinker to specialise, with the result that there is nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole. We are playing a game of chess in which nobody can see more than two or three squares at once, and so it has become impossible to form a coherent plan.

At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded."... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.

When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.

You people know a lot about trucks.

The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

Keep developing your expertise; it sets you apart.

I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.

If you do a job too well, you'll get stuck with it.

When I was at UCLA, a professor there encouraged me to write, and so I looked into specializing in creative writing in the English Department. And through that, I started writing plays.

Very narrow areas of expertise can be very productive. Develop your own profile. Develop your own niche.

In 1960, I enrolled in the chemical engineering program at UNAM, as this was then the closest way to become a physical chemist, taking math-oriented courses not available to chemistry majors.

No, I majored in biology, in a pre-med program.

Select a subject that interests you and make an effort to become an expert in that field. I promise you, if you make the effort, and you become an expert, you will have a wonderful career.

Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.

I am going to be the World Authority on Peafowl, and I hope to be offered a chair some day at the Chicken College.

Defense is my favorite part of the game and what I want to be known for.

My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'

I do like to cook. But I only cook a few things, but those few things I do really well.

No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

I have, compartmentalized in my head, one file for the NFL, one for college basketball and one for golf. They contain everything I've ever read, watched and learned.

I would like to see even more women coming in to all roles, particularly into the specialisms like firearms and public order, I would like to see women being really confident and comfortable in those roles.

I do jiu-jitsu my whole life, so why would I try to stand and bang with Mike Tyson? I'm going to learn boxing in six months because my opponent is good in boxing? That makes no sense.