Specialisation and Generalisation in Life

The idea of this post, “Specialisation and Generalisation in Life” arises when I was deciding my on future course and this topic have been discussed several times among my friends. A degree in “Business Admin” and “Accounting and Finance” were the options I’m looking at in the Business Faculty and what makes them difference is their ‘General’ and ‘Specialised’ attributes respectively. Let’s look more into Jack-of-all-trade (JOAT) and Specialisation.

Specialisation and Generalisation in Interest or Hobby

Having a hobby creates value in a person. A person who has a Jack-of-all-trade’s hobby isn’t going to have a better value than a specialized hobby. For example Ignatius Chin, without his specialized interest developed in GO, he would not have reached the stage of what he is today. Try imaging if he spends time in Basketball, Photography, Blogging, Bowling, Pool and Dancing altogether (a general interest), he wouldn’t have much time to train his GO, no time to mingle with GO members and without a strong GO background, he can’t even set up a GO Association because he can’t no tutor. With his passion in GO and bringing his dreams into reality, he is rewarded with lots of friends, invitations for GO tournaments from overseas and more to come. He is now someone with ‘value’.

There is also one important point in the above paragraph. By specializing, you evolve and be better! Hence it can bring you up one level in terms of hobby, the ‘Hobby Ladder’.

//Xinwen playing “One Colour Go” mode with Haidar. They are able to differentiate which ’stone’ belongs to them! Normal Game of Go uses Black and White Coloured stones. Xinwen is the founder of Brunei I-Go Association, such achievement at his age. (Left: Xinwen, Right: Haidar)

The Impact of Specialised Interest (or Hobby):

It creates an image, someone will think of you because you have a specialized interest.

A specialized interest in something is going to have a different effect when compared with a general interest. For example,

Girl: “Hi Johnny, who are you idols?”
Johnny: “Oh, I like Fish Leong, Lee Shen Jie, JJ Lin, Jay Chou, Power Station, Ayumi, BoA, Akane Souma, Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung and so on”
Girl: “I see, that’s a lot”

This is an example of a general interest. It is of course, useful when he has some knowledge on every of the idol mentioned but the impact is not present. There is not much of a ‘image creation’ here. Let’s take a look at the second example.

Guy: “Hi Joanne Chau, who are your idols?”
Joanne: “JAY CHOU <333!!!!”
Guy: “Oh, I see”

Do you see the difference here? It provides people with a better ‘image’ of you rather than the ‘general’s one’. When people talk about topics on Jay Chou, one will probably remember Joanne more, “Oh, Joanne likes JayChou a lot’. Johnny, in the case here will be left out more as ‘JayChou’ is one of his “general interests” only.

Now let’s try our ‘brain power’

What’s about Joanne?

= JayChou, definitely!

What’s about Johnny?

= Ayumi, JayChou, Power Station, Andy Lau… (How much more can you remember, just by reading from the text above?)

At the end of the day, who would give a stronger impact? The answer is clear

Specialisation and Generalisation in the society (life).

Being straight to the point, majority of professional job in life starts from specialization too! Lawyer started from a specialized degree in Law, Accountant starts from a specialized degree in Accounting (& Finance, ACCA etc) and Engineers is not left out too.

Therefore, it goes like this
Law Degree -> Assistant Lawyer (Trainee) –> Full Fledged Lawyer —> Attorney

If, for example, you’ve got a degree in Business Admin, a general degree, your career path will start out as

Wide Range of General Job -> (HR detects your specialty) –> Moves you into your specialized area, eg. Marketing —> Starts to climb the corporate ladder

Yes, with a general degree, you will have a broad selection of job at your hand. However, you start out as Assistant or Officer at one of the random department. After you’ve gained knowledge of that particular department, in other words, turning from a general field into a specialized field then only you move climb up the ladder. Therefore, it is considered ‘slower’ because you still need to be specialized before anything else.

I believe, generalization comes only AFTER specialization. For example

Marketing Officer -> Marketing Assistant Manager –> Marketing Manager —> Branch Manager (a general). Therefore, the a General degree comes after you climbed several ladder and required to know a little bit of this here and that there. I do make sense, don’t i?

The idiom ‘No man is an island’ applies very well here. Every community in the world is built up on mutual independence. In a typical village, there’ll someone who do the farming, someone who do weaving, someone who serve as a doctor, someone who is in charge of education, serve as security guards and so on. All these actually happened in the primal age where people ‘specialise’ in their strong attributes like hunting or rearing cows, they ‘exchange’ their service or end-product of their specialization for another person’s service or end-product in the form of barter trade. They are inter-dependant on each other. It is quite impossible for a person to survive if he were to do all (Bao Ka Liao) (eg. hunting, weaving, animal rearing) because he wouldn’t have enough time to manage plus he could not really ‘improve’ fast from his ‘jack-of-all-trade’ work, aka, can’t climb his ‘hobby/interest ladder’ fast enough.

In Business Studies, we measure this by ‘productivity’. By division of labour, people are being more productive hence are able to produce more with each labour doing different segment of their work and combine them together. In Economics, we measure it by ‘efficiency’, by specializing, people or country can increase the total output without increasing the total input. Therefore, these specialized people or country benefits from trade or even more, international trade.

We are in fact doing trading as we speak. We offer our service, specialized work in exchange for money. We use the money to buy service or specialized work of others in return.

The metamorphosis of specialization to generalization

Taking JayChou for example (yes, I love JayChou). I don’t think he’ll be so famous IF he knows a little bit of here and there (general) about lyric writing, music composition, sing, rap, acting, directing MV and directing a full movie. It is from a simply ‘lyric writing’ and ‘composing music’ first, moving on to ‘rapping’ and ‘singing’. As he gain more exposure, (climbed the ladder, upgraded) he can do a little bit of acting and lastly, directing a movie. JayChou is now a general person that outgrow from his specialized lyric and music composition.

Therefore, one of the ‘missions’ in life is to find a real specialized interest, stick to it and be good at it. This is why we always hear ‘Finish what you’ve started and do not stop halfway’. Of course, before we actually ‘start’, spend some time to find what’s your ‘path’ is.

Joke: Do not take something useless like smoking as your ‘path’ and smoke until you are the ultimate and greatest smoker on earth. HAHA.

//even tho this looked a bit cool

Benefits of Specialisation

When you are doing working on/enjoying your specialized interest, hobby or job, you look great, if not sexy. Have you ever heard of a Chinese idiom, “a girl with full passion or concentration is the prettiest”, it justifies my theory here.

//A pretty girl is just a pretty girl; a pretty girl who plays piano elegantly (for example) is 10x more sexier.

//Actually, he looks kinda cool here with his specialization. HAHAHA

To stress the importance of Specialisation

Heck, even a degree in Law has their own specialization too! There’s Community Law, Corporate Law, Criminal Law, Immigration Law, Intellectual Property Law, Legal Research & Writing Tax Law and others. (I bet Kaiping would know better). An Attorney also further specialize in their area of interest, for example, there are Trial attorneys, Appellate attorneys, Plaintiffs’ attorneys, Defendants’ attorney and so on.

Worst, even a ‘General’ degree in “Business Administration” have their own specialization too! Like Marketing, Business Information System, Human Resource, Logistic, Public Relation, Sales Management, Hospitality and Tourism, International Trade, Project Management, Banking & Finance, e-Commerce and so on. They are afraid that students who opt for Business Admin without majoring in any of the field would become ‘Jack of all trade’ and ‘Master of None’ where employer would have difficulty allocating you in their many department.

Again, don’t overly specialize yourself till “I ONLY know how to play pinball in life”, “I ONLY know how to eat in life”. =P. Funny that even ‘bad people’ specialize too in being robber, theft, kidnappers, rapist, hackers.

What are your specialisation in life? Have you found your ‘mission’ and stick with it yet?

//”I specialize in scandaling all famous HK stars!” – Edison (edited dialogue)

Something about the author – Guess what, despite all these specialization thoughts, I’m opting for a General Business Admin degree in UBD. =X If you read till the very last bit and enjoyed, why not drop me a comment here, I would be ultimately inspired to write more.

I’ve decided to move from blogger to wordpress in the end because I wanted to try more things out. I didn’t regret though but cbox is not recognized in wordpress, so readers, please drop your opinions in the form of comments now. Thank You. I felt like I’m writing an English Essay with around 1500words! Maybe I can produce a mini-life-book too. I hope ‘these’ kind of post don’t bore you out, my next post (hopefully) won’t be post like this one, but more on my personal life. Take care everyone! *coughpleasecoughcommentcoughplease* =P

*Edit* I think with specialisation, it makes up of who you are. Hanwuen? Oh the dancer, Kaiping? Oh the education freak, or analyst. PK? Oh the Holland guy, Marketing Guy in Brunei. Shenny? Ah, none other than Yunho + Fish Leong, PingChai? Ah, the Brunei Dota Player. Mable? Ah, the blog designer in MD, IngSiang? Ah, the IT Pro. Amilyn? Ah, the straight A student. Carmen? Ah, the SunYanZi singer, Jestina? Ah, the food craze blogger. Lastly, Yenchuan? Ah, the……………… (open for comments)

What relates me the most? Yenchuan the…?

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