Long-snaps and specialisation

Charley Hughlett lives most of his professional life upside down. The Cleveland Browns professional NFL player plays in one of the more unusual American football positions – the long snapper. His role is, from the snap, is to throw the ball in a perfect spiral, like a torpedo, ten metres or so back to the ‘kicker’ (another specialist position) to punt the ball downfield.

Charley Hughlett

A long snapper might only be called onto the field a handful of times during a game, to perform the snap for a single play, and then return to the bench. They are generally not required to perform any other duties for the team. They don’t have to run, pass, kick, tackle or catch – 98% of the game of American football falls outside their purview. Instead, they are expected, and do, cultivate a very narrow, specialised, but important skill to assist their teams’ offensive efforts. And they are paid on average $800,000 per annum for their time (Charley Hughlett earns $1.4m a year). Not bad for accurately throwing a ball between your legs a few times a week (excluding the off season).

This sporting analogy shows the overwhelming fiscal benefits that accrue to a professional who focuses on just one thing, and hones that craft razor sharp, and sells that skill in the market. Just like the long snapper who doesn’t get distracted by catching and running practice, the professional who can ‘double-down’ with laser-focus on just one skill becomes an incredibly valuable commodity. And just like the long snappers, they can carve out a niche for themselves even if they are not the most gifted overall athlete (long snappers, so long as they can throw accurately, don’t necessarily have to be in what might be considered as peak physical condition). You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, because by picking a skill and going very deep, specialisation allows you to compensate for any absence in raw intellectual ability. That’s good news for those of us populating the rungs below the Mensa-elite at the very pinnacle of the class.

People throw out some common objections to specialisation. Specialisation requires saying ‘no’ when you are asked to do something outside the four corners of your speciality, so as not to diffuse your efforts. And many professions lack the courage to turn away revenue today in the name of building a more specialised and valuable asset tomorrow.

Further, specialisation, or just doing one thing over and over (like those impressive, lighting-fast but slightly automotron street vendors making one dish – they may get a Miscellen star, but at the cost of some humanity) can also sound boring. Many professionals gravitate to jobs which allow them to say ‘no two days are the same’. Even Karl Marx bemoaned the lack of humanity in specialised jobs, something he saw as part of the evil of factory-line production. Yet every time I hear someone proudly announce every day is different, it sets off alarm bells. Would you trust a doctor with a heart operation who spent most of their time ‘doing different things everyday?’ Or do you want the specialist who lives, breathes and eats (well, maybe not eats) cardiovascular muscles all day long? Better to find something you love doing and do only that, then bounce around glibly between things you don’t care enough about to stick with long term.

Another objection is related to the vulnerability of specialists. It is said if you over-specialise, you might find your job destroyed one day by technology (such as the textile workers of the 19th century, whose members were put out of work by the spinning Jenny) or changes in the rules (long punters could be obliterated by a stroke of the NFL commissioner’s pen). The first comment is that it doesn’t appear immediately apparent to me why the fact that the world may change tomorrow is a legitimate excuse for not trying to improve yourself today. And in any case, there is a solution here, and that is to hedge – a bit. Developing two, or at the most three, specialised skills (what author Tim Ferris calls being a ‘specialised generalist’) still permits most of the benefits of speciality but with the safety net of being able to pivot if one of those specialities is rendered redundant. This strategy is particular effective if those skills are mutually supportive.

The final objection is the most fashionable. It is said our fast-moving modern world eschews discrete categorisation of jobs and work, and that the era of the specialist is giving way to the savvy, and hyper-connected generalist. Yet this line of argument strikes me as fadish, and ignores thousands of years of human development. Adam Smith was to economics what Charles Darwin was to evolution, and one of his great insights was that humans, in their primordial state of nature, all had to be generalists. Generalisation was our base position, as it is with all wild animals. We all had to hunt, fish, cook, fight, make baskets and light fires. Presumably, because we are not built to perform all tasks well, but with unique tendencies and talents and weaknesses, we did many of these things poorly. And this held us back as a species, because we spent too much time doing too many things ineptly, and not one thing really, really well.

The Great Leap Forward came with the invention of bartering, and later money, which freed us from having to secure all of the necessities of life and allowed us to focus on doing a single thing expertly, and then trade that for other things we needed. Instead of splitting our time between making arrows and growing tomatoes, we could focus on getting good at making arrows and trade for the tomatoes (and turnips and iPhones and Raybans).

Specialisation therefore represents a higher, more evolved version of humanity. In large part, what makes the modern world modern is the contribution of innumerable historical and still living specialists. If we are not specialising, we run against the grain of human development and contribute, by fecklessly scattering our efforts, to the underperformance of the species.

Long punters are the ultimate example of a specialised skill carving out a valuable niche. If these professional footballers tried to be a ‘jack of all trades’ they never would have made it to the professional leagues. Only specialisation has permitted them to rise to the level they have. Long punters have it harder than the rest of us, because there are only 32 NFL teams, and they only each need one full-time player in this role. The number of slots to be filled in the niche are limited.

But for professionals, there are no such constraints. The modern economy permits a vast, probably infinite, number of specialists to exists, all carving out a unique niche and method of being of value. You’re only limited by your imagination. So have courage. Focus. Go deep. Finely hone one skill. Stay focused. Don’t get distracted by shiny things. Specialise. And reap the abundant benefits.

As an example close to my heart, if you are a construction lawyer, love it, commit to it, and don’t try and spice things up with a bit of traffic law work on the side.

And in an era of runaway AI and it’s extraordinary (and accelerating) capabilities, the work of a professional who provides ‘ok to good’ answers across a range of subjects is going to be entirely undercut by technology. Our best defence is to retreat into focused specialisation, where finely honed human judgement and intuition prevails, rather than simply a good store of general knowledge. In the former domain we still have a competitive advantage over machines, in the later, a field dominated by the aggregation of a huge field of available data, the limited capacity, bandwidth and attention of our fallible brains lose every time.

There is some hope though. None of the above means you cannot dable in a range of hobbies and interests, and cultivate a broad, worldly view of life akin to the Renaissance figures of old. But do this for pleasure, not work. To be a successful professional, you have to move past the 14th century of old, quant cottage industries into the 21st. Because at the pinnacle of human achievement, when studying everyone who has achieved something great, you will always find men and women who have believed fervently in the power of focus.