We are told to specialise early, to dig deep until we master one craft.
Yet the world keeps asking for something else, adaptability and the skill to connect across fields.
The real question is — in a world of AI and complexity, is it safer to be a specialist, or wiser to be a generalist?
I chose my specialisation in high school, a path that defined my decades and made me a tax specialist.
Yet I kept wandering into economics, philosophy, psychology, and science, chasing answers beyond my field. That search hasn’t stopped.
Specialisation has a history of more than 10,000 years, dating back to the Agricultural Revolution.
In modern times, Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, popularised the 10,000-hour rule, the idea that mastery comes from years of deliberate practice.
Today’s MNEs, with their deep and complex supply chains, value specialists more than ever. Specialists are rewarded with higher income, influence, and power.
But mastery comes with its own weight.
What once thrilled can flatten into routine, even boredom, even as we climb into higher roles.
Now we stand in the AI age. In many technical fields, AI already surpasses humans, from diagnostics to coding.
But AI falters at connecting across disciplines, applying judgment, and weighing human context.
Take medicine.
When a doctor weighs cost, family resilience, ethics, and empathy while prescribing, it is no longer just medicine, it is economics, psychology, and humanity interwoven.
Take Tax.
A tax ruling against foreign investors in rare earths can ripple into industry exits, higher imports, inflation, and even national security. Horizons only broad judgment can see.
The story of specialisation is, in truth, the story of efficiency vs. adaptability.
We swing toward depth when scale demands it, and back toward breadth when complexity overwhelms. At times, even intuition grows sharper when shaped by experiences across disciplines.
Perhaps our purpose is not only to master, but also to wander, across disciplines, across ways of knowing.
During Vipassana, I learned that Buddha wandered in search of truth.
We may not renounce the world, but we can wander intellectually, and attain wisdom before it is too late.
Specialisation has served us well. But in chasing depth, we might have missed the joy of breadth, wisdom to see wider consequences and connect the bigger picture.
It is mesmerising to see how a mountain stream mirrors the human body — water flowing downhill like arteries branching to our very ends. For me, a little off-roading in the Himalayas and a little wandering in biology made the parallel clear.
Maybe the future belongs not to specialists or generalists, but to those who can master enough to be credible, and broaden enough to be wise.