With the rise of AI, it is more important than ever to develop deep specialization within your field. AI is quickly taking on the more generic administrative workload within organizations, reducing the value of that work in the marketplace. However, for people with highly specialized knowledge and skills, AI provides a powerful support service that enables them to be more efficient and effective by freeing them from menial tasks and allowing them to focus even more deeply on their area of expertise.
But everything has a cost. Developing specialized skills and knowledge takes a significant amount of time and effort, and there are only so many hours in a day. The trade-off of specialization, therefore, is that you have to be willing to become more ignorant in other areas.
And the more you talk with specialists, the more you realize this is true.
Many doctors and lawyers I know have spent so much time honing their professional skills that they know very little about topics others might consider common knowledge. And for the most part, they’re perfectly fine with that.
A quick search on TikTok or YouTube reveals countless videos of successful musicians within specific genres who have never heard of top-charting songs from other genres—even artists as prominent as Taylor Swift, who I would have assumed everyone knew.
These individuals have achieved success by going deep into their chosen fields, and they are well-compensated for it.
General knowledge usually means general payouts. Specialized knowledge usually means specialized payouts.
And with the rise of AI, specialization is becoming even more important. We’ve seen this in every industry affected by technological automation: the generalized tasks—those easier to learn and perform—are quickly replaced by machines, while specialized tasks rise in market value due to their complexity and difficulty to automate.
Personally, I’ve always recognized the value of highly developed skills and knowledge, but it took me a long time to become comfortable with being ignorant in certain areas so I could build depth in others.
But through my associations with many successful individuals, I’ve come to understand that this selective ignorance—which makes deep learning and skill development possible—is not just a by-product of success. It’s a prerequisite.
In an age where AI can do more of the surface-level thinking, the real edge comes from going deeper than most are willing to go. And to do that, you must choose what not to know just as intentionally as what you do.
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