Quotes About Specialization

We're going to move from a commodity economy where you basically grow the same kind of crops - where a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn - to an ingredient economy where there will be a kernel of corn that will be designed for fuel, there will be a kernel of corn designed for livestock.

Typecasting is a good thing. It's good to be known for what you do.

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.

Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?

the key to success isn't in all the things we do but in the handful of things we do well.

So the more things you do, the less successful you are at any one of them.

realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

Extraordinarily successful companies always have one product or service they're most known for or that makes them the most money.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Pates of Human Societies illustrates how farm-based societies that generated a surplus of food ultimately gave rise to professional specialization. "Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers." This

Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Pates of Human Societies illustrates how farm-based societies that generated a surplus of food ultimately gave rise to professional specialization.

No man can be everything. A successful long-distance cyclist can't be a bodybuilder. Though there are exceptions, dedicating one's time to becoming exceptional at one thing usually means not being exceptional at a whole lot of other things. Since no man can be everything, one of the best gifts to give is acceptance-'You don't have to be anything other than what you are.

I don't fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks but the man who has practiced 1 kick 10,000 times!

I fear not the man that can throw a thousand different kicks once, but the man who can throw one kick a thousand times.

Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.

Every single sport works out your body in a different way, and you can almost point out their bodies - like, that's a swimmer, that's a football player.

Knowing one thing well empowers you and gives you a set of tricks to the trade that you can apply across the board. Go deep, and it will serve you when you make your choices about where you want to leave your mark.

If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience.

The trouble is that after nine years as a Jack of all trades and Master of the Dominican Order, I have no expertise on anything except airports and exotic foods.

I'm really troubled by the prevalence of single-sport specializations. I want my kids to do as many things for as long as they can. Specialization is a natural thing that should come later - it shouldn't come for 8-year-olds.

There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.

Focus on identifying your target audience, communicating an authentic message that they want and need and project yourself as an "expert" within your niche.

Only when you get into TV and film, do people really want you to be a 'specialist'.

Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.

On the most basic level, agriculture leads to more food; more food leads to more people; more people leads to professional specialization; professional specialization leads to invention; invention leads to the development of greater weapons; the development of greater weapons leads to conquest. What this meant, over the centuries, is that agricultural people basically kicked the shit out of hunters.