The toner is black, fine, and seemingly sentient. It clings to the ridges of my fingerprints like a charcoal sketch of a person who used to have professional boundaries. I am hunched under the Xerox AltaLink, a machine that costs more than my first car but possesses the temperament of a colicky infant. My job title is “Senior Marketing Manager,” a designation that, on paper, involves brand strategy, market segmentation, and the occasional oversight of a creative team. In reality, my Tuesday has consisted of 45 minutes of mechanical engineering, 25 minutes of amateur legal counsel, and a frantic 35-minute dive into the backend of a Salesforce integration that looks like it was coded by a squirrel on a caffeine bender. I am wearing so many hats that my neck is starting to snap under the weight of them all.
This is the “startup life,” we are told. It is a badge of honor, a sign that we are too agile to be bogged down by the rigid silos of corporate America. But as I wipe a smudge of ink off my forehead and stare at the 125 unread emails screaming for my attention, I realize that agility is just a euphemism for being understaffed and overextended.
Lucas M. used to sit at the back of the lecture hall, his eyes narrowed behind thick, 1985-style glasses. He was my debate coach, a man who viewed a weak premise as a personal insult. I remember a specific afternoon in 2015 when he dismantled a teammate’s argument about the benefits of multi-tasking. “If you try to defend every inch of the territory,” he would drone, his voice a dry rasp that sounded like sandpaper on cedar, “you will eventually defend nothing at all.” He knew that the person who focuses on 5 different outcomes simultaneously usually achieves 5 mediocre results.
The Exploitation of Versatility
I spent last night reading through my old text messages from 2015, back when I first started this climb. I found strings of messages to my sister where I bragged about my “impact.” I felt like a Swiss Army knife. I felt indispensable. But looking at those texts now, I see a person who was being exploited by the myth of the generalist. I wasn’t being given more responsibility because I was a superstar; I was being given more work because I was the only one who wouldn’t say no.
Each time I “stepped up” to fix a problem that wasn’t in my job description, I was effectively telling my employers that they didn’t need to hire a specialist. I was subsidizing their lack of planning with my own sanity.
[The generalist is the first to be hired and the first to be replaced because they have no singular peak to defend.]
This culture of the “many hats” is a calculated strategy to extract maximum labor while providing minimum focus. When you are a jack of all trades, you are by definition a master of none. You never get the 10,000 hours required for true expertise because your hours are fractured into 15-minute increments of fire-fighting. In the hyper-competitive world of modern labor, expertise is the only real leverage an employee has. Utility players are valuable, sure, but they are also commoditized. They are the background noise of an organization.
Leverage: Specialist vs. Utility
Value is spread too thin
Commanding strategic respect
The Alchemy of Obsession
Contrast this frantic, multi-hatted existence with the world of traditional craft. Think of the master distiller, a figure who exists at the opposite pole of the “scrappy” marketing manager. A master distiller doesn’t spend their morning fixing the Wi-Fi or their afternoon drafting warehouse leases. Their entire existence is narrowed down to the chemistry of the barrel and the alchemy of the spirit.
Losing the Central Node
We have lost this appreciation for the deep dive. In our rush to be “dynamic,” we have become shallow. We are so afraid of being pigeonholed that we allow ourselves to be scattered to the wind. Lucas M. once told me that the most dangerous thing a debater can do is concede the “central node” of their argument to gain a minor point on the periphery. That is what we do every time we agree to take on a task that has nothing to do with our core competency. We win a small point of praise from a manager, but we lose the central node of our professional identity.
I told him it was too much. He looked at me with that classic, patronizing startup grin and said, “But you’re so good at wearing different hats! We need your energy.” It was a compliment designed to silence a grievance. I realized then that my “many hats” were actually a crown of thorns. I was sacrificing my long-term marketability for short-term administrative convenience.
100%
The effort spent on secondary tasks.
The Sanctuary of Expertise
There is a specific kind of grief in realizing you’ve become a generalist by accident. It’s the feeling of being wide and thin, like a puddle that evaporates at the first sign of heat. I look at my peers who stayed in their lanes-the ones who became expert data scientists or master copywriters-and I see a level of professional peace that I lack. They have a sanctuary of knowledge. When the world gets chaotic, they can retreat into their expertise. I, on the other hand, am constantly at the mercy of the next broken process.