Hey, this is Leo for actualized.org, and I am coming at you with another profound quote. Specialization is for insects. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,

con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set bones, comfort the dying, take

orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,

pitch, manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

That is a quote from Robert Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers' science fiction novel.

Okay, so what is this quote about?

Specialization is for insects. I love this idea. There's something powerful here.

And the power of this quote lies in the fact that as our society advances, we tend to get more and more specialized and we

tend to be putting ourselves in positions where we become very focused on one or two things in our life that we get really good at and this

it usually revolves around your career your your vocation. We get so focused on that and the pressures of the world, the pressures of business,

the pressures of the marketplace are forcing us to specialize that we lose touch with really

who we are, the robustness of being a human being.

And on the one hand market forces are pushing us to be more specialized.

And by more specialized I mean if you're an engineer, you need to be a specific type of engineer.

You need to maybe be an electrical engineer.

And then within an electrical engineering, you need to pick a sub-specialty of something, maybe computers.

And within computers you need to pick another subspecialty of maybe you work on

microprocessors, chips, microchips, and so you work on that.

And maybe within that there's another subspecialty, and another subspecialty, and another subspecialty.

And ultimately, what you end up doing is working within a very, very narrow, narrow slice of what is possible for you out there in life.

And then what happens is that the rest of your life is kind of like a little appendage,

a little appendage to that specialty that you're really good at.

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