Marmaland Blog

Thinking Out Loud

In this beautiful world we live in you have to focus on a specific branch of a specific area if you want to find a job. At least this is what professionals, Universities and people close to you might bomb you with: SPECIALIZE.

Choose whatever it is that you “love” and SPECIALIZE. Study, go to the University, get an LLM or a Master’s degree and then try to find a job where you can perfect your skills doing that specific thing you know to do so well because you are a SPECIALIST.

Yeah, well, ok.

We have professionals that are excellent in what they do. Let’s say, an economist, he can be the very best in analyzing data and foreseeing how the euro or the dollar might fluctuate. Uh! Or a tax lawyer specialized in the VAT (IVA in Spanish). He’ll get to know every single little rate variation and the different contexts where you have to apply the tax. Fancy! Or a painter who focuses on his art and spends the entire day mixing colors and thinking about how to capture his ideas exactly as he pictures it in his mind. Wonderful!

But then, here’s my BUT:

They get to be experts of a very little tiny room. It might be a wonderful room, their room, but a very tiny one after all.

            In this world, there’s more to it than THAT. There’s more to it than just a job.

There’s a bigger picture. There’s REALITY.

EXPAND YOUR POTENTIAL.

Do not confine yourself in the little tiny room where you soon will become isolated. Society is constantly changing, always moving, never silent. And it does not stop for anybody.

I don’t mean to sound mystic, I mean to sound realistic.

What I have seen so far: employers want you to have a specialty but they also want you to be flexible and able to adapt to the forthcoming times. That’s why in most interviews they ask you “personal” things: to see that you are not crazy, to see if you can adapt, to see if you know what is going on out there. You can have a specialty, but you are not going anywhere if you don’t keep your feet on the ground and your head open minded.

You do not learn to do this by studying your SPECIALTY. That’s something you learn on your own, over time, by having an interest in what is going on around you, in our society. By reading, traveling, learning how to be a good friend or taking care of your insecurities, for example.

Here’s something that we ALL can definitely do: LEARN.

But only if we want to.

No one is born knowing, it is a choice you make. You can decide not to learn from anything, or you can decide to try to learn from everything.

There’s no way you can be an excellent economist if you don’t know a little bit of law (and vice versa) or a relevant painter if you keep yourself in the comfort of your shell not knowing what’s happening every day around you. And above all, there’s no way we can improve our society if we only train specific skills without knowing the wide world we live in.

The day you start to get the bigger picture is an important day: the day you are able to decide what you like and what you don’t.

And we need more of THAT.