Welcome to the Jill on Money Corona virus Market Update. It is Sunday August 23rd

and we are rebroadcasting an interview that we conducted with David Epstein last year.

We heard the first part yesterday where we talked about the benefits of being a generalist.

Today, we're going to discuss how being a generalist versus a specialist can translate into your professional career and maybe why being a zigzagger in your career or your life isn't such a bad thing. Here's our interview with

David Epstein. Talk a little bit about how the generalization versus specialization, how that

now translates into career because you know we

have I am much older than you are but when I was brought up it was sort of like go get a

liberal arts education figure out what you want to do and

you might fart around a little bit and go one way or go the other way zigzag

whatever and now it seems that we are asking our younger generation of, you know, let's say

Gen Z or whoever comes next to find specialization like go to Code Camp become a coder what is the problem with

that model and what is the advantage of more of the generalist such as

just call like you know there was a guy wrote a book in

in praise of the liberal arts education so give us both sides of that yeah and

I actually decided to that was freed Zakaria's book and and I decided to

proactively stay away from that because I didn't want to prescribe a certain

course but rather that just people should be broad and one of the main advantages, not there's anything

wrong with coding at all.

One of the most important advantages has to do with what economists call match quality,

which is the degree of fit between your interests, your abilities, and the work that you do.

And that turns out to be incredibly important for your long-term motivation and for your productivity.

And so, for example, one of the economists in the book for your long-term motivation and for your productivity.

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