Going Deep vs. Going Wide

When my kids were younger and thinking about sports, we talked about their choice of going deep vs. going wide.  Did they want to pick one sport and become a specialist in it or did they want to play a variety of sports?  We would invest in their training according to their choice but they needed to make the choice.

Some people talk about this concept as the breadth and depth of experience in their careers.  The breadth is their wide diversity of experience and the depth is the time they spent learning one trade really well.

The following two quotes are from an article in the “Journalof Book of Mormon Studies” entitled, “No poor Among them” by Lindon J.Robison.  It speaks of the advantages of going deep—specializing.

“From observing pin makers, Adam Smith learned the benefits of specialization.  Whereas one worker could scarcely produce one pin a day, 10 men working together and performing different pin making tasks could produce 48,000 pins a day…Workers can increase their productivity through specialization because their ability to perform the same task improves with practice.  Furthermore, as workers repeat their tasks, they often invent tools that increase their productivity….Ralph Waldo Emerson summarized the connection:  ‘That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.”

And Joseph Smith said, “The greatest temporal and spiritual blessings which always come from faithfulness and concerted effort, never attended individual exertion or enterprise.”

I instructed my kids to go wide first, be a jack of all trades to figure out in what sport and which position on the team they excelled at.  After they found that out and obtained a depth of experience in a specialized area, they could go wide again using cross-utilization--to make use of in an additional or different way.