We have gotten remarkably good at narrow things and, in the process, quietly forgotten how to be wide ones.
Years ago I came across a passage in The Making of a Philosopher, Colin McGinn’s memoir of his life in ideas, that has stuck with me ever since. McGinn was looking back on a life spent almost entirely inside one discipline, and he admitted something that felt almost like a confession coming from a man who’d given his whole career to philosophy: that pouring everything into one pursuit, to the exclusion of everything else, doesn’t actually add up to a full life. You can master a field. You can become the person people call when a certain kind of question comes up. And in the same stroke, you can quietly starve the rest of yourself—all the other curiosities and capacities that might have made you a fuller person, not just a sharper specialist.
That idea has only gotten more relevant since McGinn wrote it. We live in an age built around narrowing. Pick a lane, get good at it, stay in it. And I think it’s worth asking, honestly, whether that’s actually good for us.
There are obvious reasons we specialize. Knowledge has outgrown any single mind. A doctor can’t also moonlight as a structural engineer; a software architect isn’t going to cover your cardiology needs on the side. The world is complicated enough now that it basically requires experts to function at all. But there’s a difference between specialization as something society needs and specialization as a blueprint for one person’s life. Society needs experts. It’s a lot less obvious that any of us, individually, needs to become one at the cost of everything else we might have been.
And that cost is real. Ask most specialists—the ones who’ve spent twenty years in one lab, one courtroom, one trading desk—what they actually know outside their field, and the honest answer is often: not much. Not because they lack curiosity, but because modern careers reward depth so relentlessly that breadth starts to feel like a luxury you can’t afford. The hours you might have spent learning to draw, or reading history for fun, or building something with your hands, quietly get poured back into getting even better at the one thing you already do well—because that’s what gets noticed, promoted, and paid.
McGinn’s worry wasn’t really about career strategy, though. It was more personal than that. A life isn’t a resume. It’s not a stack of credentials in one lane. It’s the sum of everything you’ve felt, noticed, made, argued about, failed at, and gotten curious about even when nobody was going to reward you for it. A physicist who’s never really sat with a poem, a novelist with no feel for how the physical world actually works, a CEO who couldn’t tell you the first thing about music or geology or the history of their own city—these aren’t failures of intelligence. They’re failures of range. And range isn’t some nice-to-have extra. It might be close to the whole point of having a mind capable of more than one kind of thought.
There’s also something quietly sad about specialization when it hardens into identity. When “I’m a lawyer’ or “I’m an engineer’ stops being a job description and becomes the entire architecture of who someone thinks they are, all the other selves they might have grown into—the amateur watchmaker, the backyard beekeeper, the person who might have taught themselves to restore old furniture—never get a chance to show up at all. We don’t just lose skills we might have picked up. We lose whole versions of ourselves.
I didn’t just watch this happen to other people. I started out as a musician, then moved to the other side of the business—producer, then manager and agent. It’s a field that will swallow every hour you give it if you let it, and for a long time I let it. But not entirely. I speak Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian fluently. German I studied for years in college and never quite got there—my professor, Eichele, was fond of pointing this out, and he wasn’t wrong. Visiting China, and later India, did more to rearrange how I see the world than any professional lesson ever did. None of it helped my career in any way I could put on a resume, and I won’t pretend it came free—there were nights I could have spent closing a deal instead of finishing a book, and probably a few opportunities that slipped past me because I was somewhere else, curious about something that had nothing to do with the business. But I don’t think I’d be much of anything without all of it. The work gave me a craft. Everything else gave me a mind.
None of this settles the matter, though, and fairness means pausing on the other side of the argument. Depth is how hard things actually get done. Nobody performs open-heart surgery, writes something genuinely original in mathematics, or builds a bridge that stays up by dabbling. Real expertise takes the kind of commitment that, almost by definition, eats into everything else—there are only so many hours in a life. And some people are simply happiest when they’ve found the one thing that fully absorbs them; asking them to spread themselves thinner might not round them out so much as water them down. A life built around a single, chosen passion isn’t automatically a small life. For some people it’s the biggest one available to them.
That tension is real, and I won’t pretend it resolves neatly. But most of the specialization our culture produces isn’t really the product of that kind of chosen, passionate devotion. It’s the product of economic pressure—a job market that punishes generalists, a professional culture that treats curiosity outside your lane as a waste of time. That’s a very different thing from a monk choosing one devotion on purpose. It’s closer to a narrowing forced on people who might have wanted more, if more had ever been on the table.
So no, I don’t think the answer is to throw out expertise. We need people willing to go deep, and there’s real dignity in mastering something hard. But I do think McGinn was onto something most of us don’t act on: a life needs more than one axis. All those other things—the language never learned, the instrument never picked up, the country wandered through for no professional reason at all—aren’t indulgences to trim once you’ve found your specialty. They’re part of what makes the specialty worth having in the first place, because they’re part of what makes you someone, rather than just something.
Somewhere out there is a version of you who learned the language, took the trip, picked up the instrument, and kept at it past the embarrassing part. That version doesn’t get built by accident, and the longer you wait, the fewer versions of yourself are still within reach. The age of specialization will keep rewarding you for staying exactly where you are. Nothing is stopping you from becoming someone else on the side.
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