Kevin Kelly has a great provocation, taken from his book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier, about not always striving to be the best but instead aiming to become ‘the only’. What he means by this is the need to focus on becoming a true reflection of what only you can do, in your unique way. ‘You want to be doing something,’ he says, ‘where it’s hard to explain to your mother what it is that you do’ (sidenote: somehow I managed to achieve this some time ago).
Personally, I think this is a great ambition to strive for. And I recognise what he means when he says:
“You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out. And that’s why most people’s remarkable lives are full of detours and dead ends and right turns because it’s a very high bar.”
It’s worth reading the whole thing over on Kottke, and Jason frames it nicely from the point of view of a creative person talking about how finding ‘the only’ can help individuals to reach ‘escape velocity’ from the world around them and their peers – when what you offer is so unique and differentiated that you become a category of one, and when no-one else will do. The pursuit of this goal keeps you focused on your own real strengths rather than constantly comparing yourself to your peers.
I’ve talked to a few people recently about the perennial challenge that faces consultants like me. I’m something of a generalist in that I apply my knowledge and my brain in multiple ways that cut across leadership, transformation, marketing, technology and innovation.
The potential breadth of this means that I sometimes struggle to articulate what I do in a pithy way, or to productise it in a way that clients can immediately know that they have a ‘Neil-shaped’ problem or need. Don’t get me wrong – I’m fortunate to be consistently busy with interesting and challenging work, but if you’re a specialist that focuses on a narrower area of expertise it’s arguably a lot easier to position yourself and productise what you offer.
But I also think that being a generalist like this can be a strength rather than a weakness (David Epstein’s book is excellent on this). I find that working across multiple sectors and clients, and doing a real variety of different things, stretches me in a good way and means that I’m constantly learning. The intersection of the areas I work in mean that I can benefit from seeing new angles on things, apply learning from one area to another, and identify connections better. The variety means that my working life is always challenging and interesting, for which I’m grateful.
So maybe the answer to the generalist conundrum is to embrace becoming ‘the only’. A unique mix. In fact, maybe the journey that I’ve been on has always been about that.
As Kevin says, ‘don’t be the best, be the only’.
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Photo by Fabrice Villard on Unsplash
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