An Ode to Specialization, or Why One Person Should Not Do Everything

Recently I slipped into another spell of intellectual stupor — the kind that comes after you finish your edits, send off a chapter, and then start stewing in your own juices. And, as always, something blew up inside. This time, though, constructively. “The time had come to show the world just how much it had been boiling inside him.” 🎶

I started wondering: what exactly do we devote ourselves to in graduate school? We are told: you chose psychology — now spend your whole life doing psychology. But that is an illusion. Psychology itself contains so many directions and branches, so many kinds of work, that even within a single dissertation you are forced to be a scientist, writer, editor, manager, lecturer, and press secretary all at once. And even that is only a small part of it.

Abraham Maslow, for example, emphasizes in Motivation and Personality that a real scientist is not simply a person with an idea. A scientist has to be able to formulate, investigate, analyze, write, edit, format, communicate with editorial teams, present, and explain. But even that is only the visible part of the iceberg. Beneath it lies hard science: statistics, methodology, data processing, sampling, ethics, visualization, formatting, SPSS, Excel, Word, knowledge of GOST standards, JASP, Zotero, APA, PowerPoint — and inside every piece of software there is a separate world of skills. For example, how many people actually know how to work with macros in Excel?

If you count them, a modern doctoral student needs at least 20 professional skills just for research work alone.

🅰 A SECOND PROFESSION — TEACHING 🅰

Then there is a second branch: teaching. Designing a course, writing teaching materials, preparing tests, giving lectures, mentoring students, grading work, attending meetings, using an LMS, organizing seminars — and doing all of that not mechanically, but with life in it. And of course there are department meetings, paperwork, keeping up with everything. A full-fledged second profession.

That is at least another 15 skills.

🅰 THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE 🅰

💡 Somewhere — I think in K. Jamison — I once read that the ideal development of a psychologist happens at the intersection of three professions: research, teaching, and psychotherapy. Even then I thought that the combination ought to work perfectly. The Pareto principle kicks in: in teaching, roughly speaking, you talk 80% of the time and listen 20%; in therapy it is the other way around. The 80% of one profession strengthens the 20% of the other. Each sphere reinforces the others, and the Pareto principle works across them. That is why many people call this the golden triangle of a psychologist’s development.

🅰 PSYCHOTHERAPY — ALCHEMY IN ACTION 🅰

And now psychotherapy. Here, it is not only knowledge that comes alive, but you yourself. In a session, you do not merely recall techniques; you have to be the person in whom those techniques are embodied. There are dozens of approaches — cognitive, psychoanalytic, Gestalt, humanistic, existential, systemic, body-oriented, integrative... More than 58 in all, according to the classification of the American Psychological Association. Each has its own skills.

But even if we take all the skills from science (20) and teaching (15) — 35 basic abilities in total — then, by my own feeling, the effort involved in therapy is equivalent to applying all 35 of those skills to the fifth power.

Because you do not simply know. At the same time you feel, analyze, hold boundaries, reflect, hear, speak, remain silent, notice, hold the session — and remain yourself. This is no longer just a craft. It is high alchemy.

📊 The totals: — Science: 20 skills — Teaching: 15 skills — Therapy (35 to the fifth power): 35⁵ = 52,521,875 skills → Total: 52,521,875 + 35 = 52,521,910 skills. And that is without counting reflection, laughter, coffee, or a sense of proportion.

Yes, it sounds absurd. But emotionally, it feels surprisingly close to the truth. 😅

🅰 TIME AND LIFE 🅰

Now let us be serious. According to Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, mastering one skill requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Fine.

As Steven Pinker has noted, average life expectancy today is around 70 years. Half of that is sleep. That leaves 35 waking years, or roughly 306,810 hours.

Divide those hours by 10,000 and we get: 👉 only about 30 skills that one can master to an expert level in a lifetime.

Let us compare ↙️

Needed: 52,521,910 skills.

Capacity: 30 skills.

Ratio: 0.0000571%.

💬 (By the way, how is that bill on psychological assistance and the problem of poor psychologist training going? Exhale, gentlemen.)

Now seriously: to become that genuinely ideal professional, we would need → 52,521,910 skills × 10,000 hours = 525,219,100,000 hours → almost 525 billion hours. Divide that by the resource of one lifetime — 306,810 waking hours — and we get...

📌 ≈ 1,711,871 lives. For just one profession.

🅰 THE WHEEL OF BALANCE 🅰

Now remember that there is also a life outside work. The “wheel of life balance” contains eight spheres:

Health

Personal growth

Finances

Career

Relationships

Family

Social environment

Hobbies and rest

If we try to build the ideal balance by distributing attention and effort evenly across all these areas, then the total number of hours is multiplied by eight: → 525,219,100,000 × 8 = 4,201,752,800,000 hours → roughly 13,694,967 lives.

📉 Conclusion: we can master only 0.0000571% of the total volume of skills required for the “ideal” realization of a single profession.

And only 0.0000071% of what would be required for an ideally balanced life. ❗😄🤯

🅰 YOU ARE NOT THE BUDDHA — YOU HAVE A TIME-MANAGEMENT PROBLEM 🅰

Against this background, the Buddha comes to mind. According to the Pali canon, he passed through 547 lives — in the Jataka — while other texts speak of a hundred thousand lives and four asankhyeyas, literally “an incalculable multitude”, before reaching enlightenment. Only then did he become the one who had “mastered everything”: inner peace, knowledge, his relationship with the world, and practice. Complete balance. Complete clarity. Complete liberation. ✨

And this is where I want to draw a conclusion that, perhaps, brings together existentialism, statistics, and the student vibe.

If you honestly estimate how many lives it would take to master all the skills, maintain balance, avoid burnout, remain in the profession, and not lose your mind in the process, it turns out that in the whole history of humanity there has been only one doctoral student who actually managed it.

And his name was Buddha.

Who else could it be? According to different sources, he really did live anywhere from 547 to a hundred thousand lives in order to master everything. And even then he remained inside the wheel. Not the career wheel, no. Samsara. The very wheel we dream of getting off in the third year of graduate school, yet somehow keep riding — on autopilot, on deadlines, on coffee, and some people even on a wheel of their own (though not the Wheel of Samsara 😄💊).

And here is the paradox: to leave the wheel, you have to master it completely. Become scientist, teacher, and therapist at the same time — while clinging to none of them. Master every skill — and not call it a “résumé”. Listen — and remain silent. Speak — and not prove anything. Do — and not burn out. In other words, become enlightened. Or at least finish the dissertation.

And, to be precise: Buddha was apparently just a doctoral student who did everything on time. And, most importantly, passed. He earned his samsara just as Socrates earned his hemlock. He did not leave the wheel — he became its center. And we ordinary mortals are not sure whether we deserve the dissertation committee’s approval or simply the right to resit the exam in the next life.

🅰 SPECIALIZATION IS NOT WEAKNESS 🅰

The point is to understand what we can actually achieve in our very short lives. That is why specialization is necessary. Even in something as narrow as writing an article: someone generates the ideas, someone edits, someone analyzes, someone handles promotion. One person cannot be everything. We are not Marvel superheroes. Not little Buddhas. We are doctoral students. We try things, discover where we feel at home, and only then understand what we want to specialize in. I am saying this honestly.

For example, GPT and I have just finished another block of edits. And I realized a long time ago that I do not enjoy stylistic polishing. I am about the substance. I can produce the idea, the concept, conduct the study, lay down the skeleton of a text. But I cannot sit there proofreading prose — it is simply not mine. Fine-tuning formulations, grammar, cleaning everything up to fit a format — that is not my thing. I would gladly hand it over to co-authors. And that is normal.

I write metaphorically, sometimes in a slightly broken language, not always with strict logic — but in the way the text breathes in the moment. This text you are reading right now, dear reader, is not an algorithm and not a manual. To become one, it would need proofreading, polishing, formatting. That is not what I am about. I am about impulse. About the idea.

So if you are sitting over revisions right now, everything is swimming before your eyes, and you think you are talentless because you cannot remember where the comma goes and where the dash goes — know this: you are not alone. You are not required to be perfect. But you do need to understand where your strength is. And build cooperation around it. That is what real science is about.

P.S. And yes, graduate school does not turn you into a universal psychologist. It gives you a chance to discover where your psychological home is.

A SYSTEM OF COUNTERWEIGHTS

But if I say that specialization is necessary both in graduate school and in life, it is important to remember one nuance. Here is what R. Kiyosaki writes about it:

For some reason everyone believes that specialization is necessary in education and professional life. In other words, to make more money or build a more successful career, you need to specialize.

My educated dad also subscribed to this popular view. That is why he was so happy when he finally received his doctorate. At the same time, he often said that the education system encourages people who learn more and more about less and less.

Rich Dad advised me to do the opposite. “You should aim to know a little about everything,” he told me.

And here is how Nietzsche — a master of sharp formulations and deep observations — warned about the same thing. His words sound especially pointed in our age of endless “niches”:

The dangers threatening the development of the philosopher today are truly so numerous that one may doubt whether this fruit can ripen at all. The scope and height of the tower of science have grown to monstrous proportions, and with them the likelihood that the philosopher will tire while still learning, or become stuck somewhere and “specialize”, never reaching the summit from which he can look around, survey, and look down. Or he will arrive there too late, when his strength is gone and the best time has passed, or when he has already been damaged, coarsened and degenerated, so that his view and overall judgment of things will have little value...

But the true philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely”, above all unwisely, and feels the burden and duty of subjecting himself to many trials and temptations of life: he constantly risks himself; he plays a dangerous game...

📌 And this brings us to the key point: specialization is a strength, but only if it has a system of counterweights. When you work in a single direction all the time, your vision inevitably becomes blurred, enthusiasm fades, and the brain enters an “energy-saving mode”.

💡 Herbert Spencer once spoke about “changing the working organ”: if you regularly switch activities, even to something you pursue at a lighter level, you not only maintain cognitive tone, but also return to your niche recharged, with fresh ideas and a depth you did not suspect before.

🎯 The paradox is that variety strengthens specialization, while specialization makes your “side” interests even more interesting. This is living dialectics: two forces that seem to pull in opposite directions actually lift you higher.

Look for your own system of counterweights ⚖️ — a balance in which both depth and breadth serve the same thing: your development and your uniqueness.

So, have you figured out where your strength lies? Share in the comments which professional tasks come easily to you — and which ones drain you.

Sources 📚

1. Maslow A. Motivation and Personality. St. Petersburg: Piter, 2007. 352 p.

2. Gladwell M. Outliers: The Story of Success. Moscow: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2014. 368 p.

3. Jamison K. An Unquiet Mind. Moscow: Alpina Publisher, 2017. 226 p. Mentioned as the source of the “golden triangle” idea.

Quote from the battle ST vs Oxxxymiron* 🎶

*Designated a “foreign agent” in Russia.