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Generally speaking, you shouldn’t specialize.

Generally speaking, you shouldn’t specialize.

 

If your goal is to make you and your family safer, to learn how to survive dangerous events, you need a generalist’s perspective.

That’s because there are a wide range of things you need to know to make safety happen consistently, which means that you need to study and prepare in many different areas — most of which have little overlap. Most importantly, you need to know how everything works together to protect you.

In order to learn about each of those things, you go to specialists: people with a deep body of knowledge in the individual things you need to be familiar with. So you go to a specialist to learn one thing, then you go to another specialist in different area of expertise and learn about the next thing.

Repeat until done.

The problem comes when you go to a specialist in one thing, then another specialist in that same thing, and then still another specialist in that thing — because that thing is fun. You may be enjoying yourself, but you’re only learning about one small piece of the total picture. It’s easy to believe that you’re learning a wide range of things because each specialist has a slightly different take on his/her thing, but you’re just learning the same thing over and over.

Your job as a generalist is to understand how to use specialists, not become one yourself. Make that your thing.

– Grant

 

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  • Posted by Grant Cunningham
  • On October 28, 2016
Tags: instructors, security