Quotes About Specialization

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best.

You really can't try to do everything, especially if you intend to be the best in the world.

If you took organic chemistry in college, you've experienced the Dip. Academia doesn't want too many unmotivated people to attempt medical school, so they set up a screen. Organic chemistry is the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. If you can't handle organic chemistry, well, then, you can't go to med school.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success. When

people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know. The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.

real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip—a barrier between those who try and those who succeed.

If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip—a barrier between those who try and those who succeed. And you've got to get through that Dip to the other side. This isn't for everyone. If it were, there'd be no superstars.

The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best. If your micromarket is "organic markets in Tulsa," then that's your world. And being the best in that world is the place to be.

The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone. It will lead to compromises and generalizations. Begin instead with the smallest viable market. What's the minimum number of people you would need to influence to make it worth the effort?

The wrong way to look at your university life is to say it's like job training, unless you're going into something very specific.

Quarterback is not a position that you come in having not played it your whole life.

There are plenty of people in the world whose lives are governed by rote and routine. Such people will never be happy dealing with me, because I don't conform. Luckily, the world is also full of people who care about results, and those people are usually very happy with me, because my Asperger's compels me to be the ultimate expert in whatever field of interest I choose. And with substantial knowledge, I can obtain good results.

believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can't function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics.

I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can't function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

As we continue to specialize and become increasingly more productive, the fruits of our labor are no longer things we consume ourselves. They become "commodities," literally the things that make our lives comfortable, which we buy and sell in exchange for other goods.

Starting with chapter 1, Smith explains how the business of civilization gets done, by isolating the basic principle that explains all social improvement: the division of labor. This is Smith's term. The idea itself probably originated with David Hume, who called it "the partition of employments." We use another, perhaps better, word for it: specialization.

I am the shoemaker who sees only shoes in the world; being a therapist, I see only pain in humans. All scientists have to be careful of this because when we have a hammer, everything in the world looks like a nail.

The Godrej group is expanding rapidly. However, we are not diversifying much.