Jack of all trades, master of none: we’re all familiar with that one. Guess what? It’s bullshit. Yes, there are people who know way more about CSS and SEO than me, but I still know more about them than 99% of the population, and so far, that’s been plenty good enough.
The Problem with Specialists
It’s an accepted bit of conventional wisdom that if you want to really succeed in life, you need to become a specialist: somebody who knows more about a single subject than anyone else. There is truth to that, but there are many more interconnected truths that become a problem for specialists.
Take SEO (search engine optimization) and web design, for example. You hire an SEO specialist after you hired a web designer who you thought knew everything about web design. In your mind, you lumped in a bunch of stuff in with "web design" that your web designer was clueless about.
After all, a web design specialist does not study SEO. He or she studies web design, and that’s it. You later find out you have zero SEO, and you’re ticked off. Now you hire yet another specialist who is going to do all kinds of changes to your site and other things you don’t understand. if this stuff had been done as part of the original design, you would have saved thousands of dollars.
Or let’s say you have a web designer already, and you’re thinking about getting into blogging. Your web designer doesn’t have a blog and doesn’t have a lot of experience with setting up, configuring, and designing blogs. Now you’re paying them to learn on your dime while they figure it out. Nice, huh?
One more: you hire a "technical" person, maybe a programmer. This person doesn’t know the first thing about design. He can’t even get his Geranimals to match (remember those? Heh…). Color theory? Typography? What? This person is also completely clueless about marketing, getting blog traffic, or using social media to assist in growing the blog. Good luck.
Forest for the Trees
You need someone who can do more than one thing, someone who sees the big picture and how all the parts interrelate and support each other. We have a term for this: Renaissance Man. This is the opposite idea of the bumbling mental image offered by the "Jack of all trades, master of none" title. A Renaissance person (to get with the times) is a person who is good at many things. The benefits of this are exponential.
A person who understands web design, marketing, selling, SEO, and all the technical stuff is a formidable ally. Better to have a person like this in your corner any day than a specialist who cannot do anything for you at all as soon you step off the edge of their narrow map.
Advantages of Generalists
- You don’t have to pay redundantly expensive fees to multiple specialists. A generalist is, generally (sorry!) less expensive in the long run.
- You don’t have to keep explaining yourself over and over again to different people. One good generalist (excuse me, Renaissance person) has a holistic, 360-degree view of your situation.
- You don’t have to try and communicate stuff you barely understand from one specialist to another in order to make sure that multiple specialists aren’t leaving huge gaps in your service coverage simply because they have no idea what the other specialists do.
- You have heard the phrase: "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". That’s what you get with a Renaissance generalist: You get it all.
I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major Generalist
Ah, sorry, more bad punnage. I really just can’t help it. 
I’m going to do something I haven’t ever done here, even on my business blog consulting services page, and that is: spell out all of my skills and experience. Why haven’t I done this before? Mostly because people don’t know or care what the individual skills are, they just want results. But I want to do this to show how broad and deep a person can be, so that if you choose to hire me, you know what you’re getting. So here they are:
- (X)HTML
- CSS
- Graphic Design for both web and print
- Web content writing
- Copywriting
- Marketing
- Installing WordPress in a variety of hosting company configurations
- Installing and configuring WordPress plugins
- Setting up and properly optimizing FeedBurner accounts
- SEO for both on and off-page factors
- Blog writing
- Blog marketing strategy
- WordPress theme design
- WordPress template tags
- Blogger template design
- Social media marketing and strategy
- Migrating from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress
- Migrating from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress
- Adding a blog onto an existing site
- Converting an existing site over to using WordPress as a CMS
- Modifying an .htaccess file
- Conversion-based design
- Conversion-based content
- Maintaining and upgrading WordPress blogs and plugins
- Google Analytics
- Google AdSense
- Ebook design and creation (expert at Microsoft Word 2007 and Adobe Acrobat)
When you get me, you get all of that. I suppose if I were to claim credit as a specialist, it would be for WordPress and business blogging, but I prefer the more romantic term of Renaissance Man, because I’m, well, romantic like that. This isn’t a brag-fest for me, this is about you knowing exactly what you get if you hire me.
And make no mistake, I am in business, here. I am in the business of holding your hand as we walk together through the scary territory of starting or improving a blog and getting results… and succeeding. I’ve made this journey many times and I know the way, and that’s why I feel I’m worth your time and money. A generalist has a broad base of experience from which to draw, but a specialist’s viewpoint is, by definition, limited.
If you’re interested in telling me what you need, you can contact me here. If you’re not ready for that, yet, and you want to hang out for a while and get to know me better, you can subscribe to the blog.
I love that “I’ve made this journey many times and I know the way.”
@Jean – Thanks. Maybe I should say I’m a tour guide!
Or cruise director!
@Sonia – when I was a kid I watched a lot of Love Boat.
Now that I think about it, that might explain a lot…
I watched a lot of “Love Boat” with my then-13-year-old daughter the year after The Divorce. Followed by “The Incredible Hulk” and “Fantasy Island.” (“A plane! A plane!”) It was a great bonding experience. She’s in her 40s now (yikes!)with a 13-year-old of her own, and we still laugh about that.
@Jean – Yes! Me too, LOL. Incredible Hulk, Fantasy Island, yup! And then a bit later: Knight Rider and A-Team.
I love it when a plan comes together…
A wise man once said, “An expert is someone who learns more and more about less and less, and eventually knows everything about nothing!”
I’m curious to know why you listed “Modifying an .htaccess file” as a skill. I hope you’ve modified more than one.
@PixelWit – LOL, that’s a good one! I like that. I have modified a few .htaccess files in my time, yes! It’s a mystery to most people for many reasons, the first of which is usually they can’t see it because of its unusual dot-first name. And if you screw up an .htaccess file, your whole site can be inaccessible until you fix it. Messing with them puts most folks way out of their comfort zone.
Good one, Michael. This reminds me of our own business, where we offer much the same services as yours (probably to a different target market). We specialize in online business from content to CSS, so I’m not keen on taking the “generalist” label onto ourselves.
Well done!
Michael,
Thanks for this post. I wish I had known this about three weeks ago when I lost my database and my original blog. I asked several people for help with the blog but received no response. I have since moved the blog to a blog friendly host and literally started over. Mine is not a business blog, it’s about caregiving, but it’s important to me just the same.
I will probably need help later so I will cherish this info. Thanks for listing all of your skills and taking the guess work out of finding assistance.
@Valerie – I’m sorry you had such a bad experience due to a lack of knowledge and expertise from others.
You still may be able to recover your old posts, though it will be painstaking. Check out the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for your old site. You may be able to copy and paste the old posts. If you need help in the future, you know where to find me!
@Valerie: If you had a feed on Feedburner, just go and grab your old posts from your feed. James and I had to do that once before.
@Harry – that is a great idea! (if you have a FeedBurner feed, anyways.)
[...] Now, I’m not knocking the idea that focused study will make you a master at something. Can’t be a brain surgeon or rocket scientist without it. But specialized mastery of one subject alone will not boost your chances of growing fast in your business. A healthy dose of generalizing, however, will. (Michael gets this.) [...]