Excellence resides in quality not in quantity. The best is always few and rare: much lowers value... Intensity gives eminence, and rises to the heroic in matters sublime.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Much lowers value: three words that indict half of modern working life. The crowded CV, the sprawling menu, the service firm that does everything adequately, all obey the same law, and the law says discount. Value concentrates where depth does. One thing done at a level few can reach outprices ten things done at a level anyone can hire. This gets truer with age, not less: mid-career breadth is a commodity in a market full of experienced generalists, while mid-career depth, the twenty-year specialty, the judgment that only repetition builds, is scarce by definition.
Practice
- Name the one capability you want to be undeniable at in three years, and give it first claim on your learning hours.
- Prune the portfolio: every offering, committee, and sideline that dilutes the core is charging you rent in focus.
- When introducing yourself, lead with the deep thing. The person who is "into many things" is remembered for none.
Use this when
- Use this at the mid-career fork, when the temptation is to add another certificate sideways instead of a level upward.
- Use it building a practice or business: the narrow famous thing brings clients that the broad vague thing never will.
Ignore this when
- Don't confuse depth with tunnel vision; the deep specialist still needs working breadth to connect his depth to the world.
- Don't prune income you currently need. Narrow deliberately, on a schedule, not romantically overnight.
A picture of it
A two-partner design studio takes every brief for five years: logos, weddings, packaging, whatever pays. Busy, tired, forgettable. Then they decline everything except packaging for food brands, the one category where their work kept winning. Revenue dips for two quarters. In year three, brands they never pitched start calling, because when anyone in that industry says "packaging," one studio name comes up. The menu shrank. The price tripled.
Be famous for one thing. The world files "many things" under nothing.