This one's been on my mind for a long, long while. I've been making notes about this on my phone for ages, and I thought I might spend my sabbatical time in January actually constructing something that was structured and really detailed around this subject, but as is the way with me, I didn't, and then it becomes something that I produce instinctively.
To be clear, I've produced several blogs like this over the years; the first one, I think, was the GDC blog, a 7 part series about my case, which kind of broke my aspect of the internet.
The second one is when I wrote about orthodontists in the NHS and how I basically thought that many of them were just stealing from the NHS to buy planes.
The third one was the MSc Myth - Lots of people hated that blog, and I got a lot of hate for that.
As I look back on all of these three, the GDC, NHS ortho and the MSc myth, it seems that I wasn't so far off the mark, so let's try again and see where we get to in the next 5 years with this one.
It starts with Range, the book by David Epstein, which celebrates the rise of the generalist. It's an extraordinary exploration of why generalists rule the world and why they tell specialists what to do.
The most extraordinary people I've ever met in the world would be classified as generalists (even the ones with a specialist title who are actually generalists).
If you would like examples of that, I can give them to you as follows.
- Rony Jung
Rony Jung laughs about the fact that he gets invited to the most periodontology conferences, even though he's not a specialist in periodontology.
Rony is an extraordinary individual who understands a lot about aspects of dentistry in lots of different spheres. I've seen him work in his clinic in Zurich; he can extract teeth, cut crown preps, place implants, do bone grafts, take photographs, and diagnose periodontology problems- it's extraordinary; the soft tissue work is out of this world.
- A range of CEO personalities that I have met who again know a little amount about an awful lot of subjects. People who can pivot in different subjects and understand finance and marketing, HR and strategy, and all of these things that are essential to running a successful business.
- Roger Federer
Roger Federer wasn't a tennis player for a large part of his life. His parents were tennis coaches, but he was much more into dancing and various other sports; he actually wanted to be a professional footballer.
It was only later in his teens that he turned to tennis, and many people would suggest that that's why he remained so relatively injury-free throughout his tennis career.
Most people understand now that pushing children into a single sport at an early age is absolutely not the way to make a champion, the guys who did this were extreme outliers.
See tomorrow's blog for part 2!
Blog Post Number - 4090
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