We Do Not Need Specialists

Business is a chaotic and painful experience; we all know that. In a selfish and narcissistic way, we often step into the entrepreneurial, financial, and life-changing path with the wrong set of skills. Dreaming about being successful, rich, or even powerful is a right that we can legitimately cultivate in our minds and pursue day by day. However, we all start analyzing the vision or project, mainly taking into consideration our unnecessary qualities, but more precisely, the easiest to discover and display: those that are just useless. In this article, therefore, the author will primarily examine the way we usually approach decision-making and information analysis processes and how this might have a significant impact on the final and expected results.

Complexities, huge amounts of data, structured processes, constant human interactions, financial struggles, multiple risk assessments, legal burdens, and so on; business is like human life: a set of basically unknown events that must be faced on a one-to-one basis trying to be as much prepared as possible to, first, avoid fatal damages and, second, get closer to the dreamed goal. Nowadays, the level of external inputs that affect business decisions and entrepreneurship are just too sophisticated to be managed with an ordinary and forecastable method. Usually, success comes only from being able to properly surf the chaos, the mess that is daily shot against our business, career targets, or personal life.

So, the questions are, who is needed in business? Who can survive this unscrupulous environment? Who must sit on the highest chair to avoid the shipwreck? The general and misleading belief – sometimes still taught to our younger and talented generations - is that being highly specialized individuals, technicians, and niche experts will enable everyone to properly get what they want in life (mainly financially and career-wise speaking). In my experience, stealing tons of knowledge and hard skills over the years has always been perceived as one of the main ways to climb the social pyramid and get your family and friends proud of you. Well, from a first-sight perspective, this is partially true; do not get me wrong. Having a solid and precise understanding of a specific field, sector, or subject enables people to distinguish themselves from the masses, be able to shine during a business meeting, impress our relatives during the weekends, showing proper self-confidence, and so on. However, unfortunately, being a so-called specialist is just the very first step of our daily race to be a better business and life survivor, aka a true leader. In summary, being a specialist helps a lot our inner and vast ego more than our external and hoped entrepreneurial and business success.

Specialists, as we all are in one field or another, are models, easily understandable categories, that allow individuals to smoothly move around society and integrate immediately into conversations, environments, and situations. As lawyers, engineers, university professors, investment bankers, accountants, and so on, we can easily fit everywhere, get immediately categorized by our counterparties, and quickly drop in the room a solid reference that will sustain both us and all the human audience we are facing in that specific moment and historical period. Question: is that a support or a mask? Is that a tool or a trap? The correct answer, as frequently is the case, stays in the middle. Specialism is a supportive tool that must be used by smart people to enter the main door, make the very first decision, to start the conversation, commence the analysis, and assess first-layer inputs and stimuli. But in my opinion, it is not the final solution. Life and business are not a matter of making good first impressions; during our journey, we must immediately understand circumstances, unlock insanely irrational situations, avoid damages, and create unique scenarios. It is always a matter of short vs. long-term. Long-termism wins. But a long-term general approach is colliding with assessing life and business events constantly dressed in a specialist costume. Being stuck in specialism for years or (worst) decades is like applying short-term to all the aspects of our life, missing the enjoyment of properly navigating the multitude of complex disorder that surrounds our existence.

As mentioned above, positive results come from continuous and intense assessments of information and stimuli that randomly cross our road(s) on an hourly basis. In processing all these data, we must be precise, calm, and efficient human calculators. By reversing the perspective in this way, it will be clear why specialism is just one of the thousand instruments we own and develop over a lifetime period, but it will never represent the sole solution. The world is driven by decisions, and most of them are wrong ones, or at least are just not that good, compromises between information, time, costs, risks, and final action. Therefore, processing is the key, and processing efficiently is critical. Our inner specialist nature, it is now clear, cannot be the parameter with which we evaluate the external reality. Taking our best technical knowledge as a perpetual decision-making drive will certainly boost our confidence and create short-term success, but most likely, it will fake the perception of building a solid chain of adequate decisions. The technical me that governs us is ready to compose a pattern of outcomes that might be simply tragic.

Consequently, if the immense amount of specialist skills we possess - with effort learned in the best universities over the world and from the top-notch firms globally - are not the magic formula for being a decent leader and human being, what should be the actual approach to follow? The matter now became pretty much philosophical, but - I suppose - it was, in part, the main scope of this article. Once again, there are no clear answers nor pre-developed processes or patterns to be strictly followed during decision-making (both in life and business). Here, we are therefore moving our analysis to a more general view, the farthest one, trying to find the real standpoint from where we can attempt to see (at least a minority part of) the well-known and dramatically spoken big picture. Winners, innovators, true leaders (not the self-proclaimed ones), mentors, best parents, partners, and friends have all in common one single, rare, and peculiar ability: to swiftly adapt their mental structures to the outer sphere. Those who succeed in life are the ones who can disrupt - in the blink of an eye - their inner nature and self-built automatic behaviors and responses to embrace, to the fullest, the inputs. The best individuals, again, are able - as the first and essential step of the process - to question themselves immediately, before even replying or responding to any sort of data or information; they build a defense wall structure in the form of a healthy auto-attack of their own most solid beliefs, by de-structuring any sort of easy path provided by the pre-developed and individual technical skills. Moreover, the brightest implement this system naturally and without hesitation: despite everything, time is money, and money is essentially making good decisions.

So, life and business must teach us to reverse the perspective, to turn all the cards upside down, and to interrogate us not on how people perceive ourselves and our qualities. People should not be moved in life by what the external and superficial mask of technicalities tell about them; they should not be motivated to take insanely risky actions and delicate decisions based on comments and superficial advice from friends, relatives, colleagues, or professors that just assess our laziest parts, our predictable values. Growth is led by us only. Conversely, aspiring to be an excellent decision-maker, both professionally and personally, goes through the hurting operation of asking ourselves if we are sufficiently good in questioning our inner excellences. In essence, incessantly self-interrogating if - before taking prompt action - we will be able to forget about and lose ourselves in order to properly learn. Moreover, by adopting this mindset, the presentation and introduction to the world of our personality (in relationship and work-driven environments that, however, often reflect the same human dynamics) will be inevitably impacted. Forgetting about the solidity of the constant specialist training that forged our brains, present immediately - to any kind of exterior audience - a completely new human being. The focus will smoothly shift from a tendent attention-seeking behavior to one that - even if at first sight might appear cautious - listens and calmy assesses each detail of the surroundings.

There is no arrogant ambition here to provide one-stop solutions nor criticize nor denigrate specialists and technicians (once again, we all are, inevitably, in one field or another). Specialism is our foundation; it is where we come from, and we will never forget it. However, business and entrepreneurship are just chaos, disorder, and sometimes anarchy. This massive and perpetual impetus shall be fought by trying not to pre-classify any of those inputs. Analyzing highly complex and sophisticated sets of information and situations (and, nowadays, also our social interactions and romantic relationships can be classified as such) must be properly enjoyed. Asking ourselves why, given our beliefs and background (academic, work and personal), we are struggling to unlock a specific scenario (also very foolish like, for instance, why a specific customer does not accept our innovative business proposal? Why do my lawyers keep telling me the same thing when we are planning our litigation strategy, not listening to my real needs and goals? Why is my colleague not willing to support me, even if I am struggling with a huge workload?) just kick us in the middle of a mental labyrinth with no exit. Excelling in decision-making, once again, is just a matter of cracking the system, opening new mental doors in a millisecond, and adjust, changing - sometimes - dramatically our skin. The latter concept might appear negative, like faking what we are, a sort of hidden dance where we might be forced to tell a different and not believed story of our past. That is not the case.

Assessing information properly is a weapon that we all have. It is one of the most fascinating exercises and skills that we can target to master during our life, a process that - since life is short - we must enjoy. Enjoying decision-making and information analysis allows us to understand better who we are, more than what we formally became after years of studies and higher education. Part of the secret for this - at least for the author of this short article - is looking at the shapeless multitude of informational bullets that are shot at us every second, stop time, and, as humans (by also - why not - following our gut from time to time) evaluate what is going on and what has been told or written or read in the exact moment. Only following this breakdown procedure, where we feel, more than count, we can come back as fancy and proud specialists, specialists that are now, finally, free from their self-imposed chains and ready to act properly.