Most creative people instinctively resist the idea of specialising. We enjoy variety, new challenges, and talk disparagingly about being pigeon-holed or typecast.
But there are strong arguments for specialising and I wish, earlier on in my career, I had heard them. So here are five arguments on why creatives should specialise:
1) Specialising lets you get good. You see similar situations and work out the patterns and become an expert. In a world where there’s limited time to learn lots of things, the only real option for getting good at something is to focus.
2) Real impact usually comes from specialists working on their own or with others. Speilberg and John Williams are a great creative partnership because they are both experts in their areas.
3) Expertise isn’t dull, or at least that’s not usually what experts tell you. Normally they talk about how the more they know, the more they realise there is to know and that’s exciting.
4) People known for their creative variety often started with mastering a specialism or niche. Neil Gaiman wrote comics. Charlie Brooker wrote funny columns about TV.
5) Being the same as everyone else, a lack of “differentiation” in business-speak, is economic death. On the other hand, expertise — especially rare expertise in a valuable area — means less competition and business coming to you. So a focus in your career can fund an abundance outside of it: time and money for creative side projects, racing tractors, learning Italian etc.
Obviously, lots of questions follow from all this but for now, I just wanted to set out the basic idea: there are good creative reasons to find a niche and specialise!
(P.S. A good introduction to this topic is David C Baker and Blair Enns discussion in this episode of their podcast, Two Bobs.)