Today I spent a little bit of time updating the homepage of my writing website, DSRGhostwriting.com.

Trying to summarize the type of technology I have written about for clients over the past four to five years was a bit more difficult than I expected.

• There was that wacky white paper (couldn’t resist the alliteration, but it really wasn’t that wacky) about how Low Earth Orbit satellites (LEO) are allowing cruise ship operators to deploy better payment solutions at sea. Did you know that there are more than 2,200 LEOs orbiting earth!?

• A couple of interesting articles for a contract client around this time last year probing into the murky underworld of dark web fora and helping the company’s clients — including some law enforcement people — figure out a way to build API queries that catered for the fact that people on the dark web tend to speak in their own coded lexicon.

• Then there are the much more accessible blog posts I wrote for a telecommunications provider trying to convince local businesses, in an Asian country, of the need to “digitalize” — explaining how a certain provider’s solutions would make it more easy for them to access global markets.

And potentially dozens of pieces, for various clients, about why to move from your creaky legacy systems to the cloud. Lots and lots about the cloud.

Being A Generalist Specialist

Freelance writers, and creatives, are being constantly adjured to “niche down” — and to niche down further if they’re already plumbing a niche.

The thinking goes a little bit like this.

Anybody can write (or so we’re told; when it comes to writing to professional standards, at the tempo professional writers need to maintain, I strongly disagree).

Fewer people can write in great detail about VoIP solutions. Or why those with peanut allergies have faulty immunological responses. Or about the difference between LEO satellites and those in higher orbits.

Fewer people again can write, to an industry audience, about the intricacies of robot-assisted surgery, the linear regression machine learning algorithm, and cybersecurity best practices for Kubernetes clusters.

Go continuously deeper, the drumbeat demands, until you’re one of few people on the planet capable of writing about a very narrow series of topics. Then, you’ll find yourself on the right side of the supply-demand curve and can chip in on your elusiveness.

However, I’d like to make the case for why not to take that journey all the way. Or at least to proceed along it with caution.

1. It’s Bad Business Sense

Over the years, I have had a couple of prospects whose expectations for work exceeded what I knew myself to be capable of producing at the time. When this happens, I simply tell them — because there’s no point in wasting everybody’s time. One, of recent vintage, wanted an expert-level overview (with strong emphasis on that fact because of the intended readership) of the fine cryptographic differences between two encryption algorithms.

To which I would love to have responded (but didn’t):

“Sir, if I knew enough about cryptography to be able to write this article, I probably wouldn’t be in marketing writing.”

No disrespect intended to what I do. I enjoy it. But I would argue that if you’ve managed to rise yourself to the level of a world-leading expert in whatever field you’re writing — especially one such as cryptography — then you should probably switch into that field and cash in on your experience. Otherwise, demand top dollar. Unrealistic demands abound when those in highly specialized fields lose perspective on how specialized their offering is.

To my mind being a creative within a specialized area entails being able to leverage both a creative mindset — which the operational resources on the client side often lack — alongside an understanding of the company’s niche industry, which total generalists would lack too. That’s the value add and — if you’re specialized enough — can even become a USP. I don’t see any sense in shifting the balance too far towards either polarity.

2. Writing About The Same Exact Thing Gets Boring … REALLY BORING!

Another early client example from my annals.

I once wrote about VPNs for one of my earliest clients.

Client A referred me to Client B who also happened to need articles about VPNs.

Client C, who I still work with, sometimes needs writing about VPNs — but thankfully also needs writing about a few different B2C technology products.

I wrote a Medium piece, a few months, ago, about The Five Common VPN Myths.And I stand by what I wrote.

There’s a lot of marketing misinformation about VPNs. Many of them do more or less the same thing. And most VPN features, for most people, are far more than they require.

Can you imagine writing about the same subject matter every week for 18 months?

I did precisely this and I hope that I did it well. But the basic things one can know about VPNs is a finite pool of knowledge and repetition — and boredom — was thus virtually inevitable. The experience underscored, for me, the importance of maintaining a diverse client base. If you’re also in technology I would recommend picking at least four or five subjects that you are interested in.

Otherwise weird situations can easily emerge. You might find yourself working for several players in an industry who all do virtually identical things. You might be the only writer in the world good enough to write competently about a machine learning algorithm but then loose interest in machine learning altogether or that particular algorithm. Or you might find yourself writing about VPNs from morning until evening.

3. Trends, In Most Industries, Are Fickle — And Predicating A Career On One Is A Risky Gambit

Today, everybody is interested in Dockers, Kubernetes, Containers, and how serverless infrastructure makes a lot of sense from a technical perspective and allows DevOps people to have think even less about getting the infrastructure running they need to house their cloud-hosted product or software.

A few short years ago everybody wanted to talk about the massive potential of the cloud and how every legacy system ever needed to be there (opinion: the continued existence of mainframe computing demonstrates that not everything, currently, can economically be shifted to the cloud). A few years before that, people needed basic instructional content on what the cloud even was.

My point here is that taking a long view of almost any industry will probably demonstrate that hitching a 20 year career solely on the (technological) flavor of the day is a poor decision from a strategy perspective. This is as true for full-time employees as it is for freelancers.

To throw in a truism, one should always be making small adjustments in business. It would be prudent for most contractors in an industry to attend industry conferences, and listen to podcasts, solely to know what conversations are happening and what industry experts are expecting to happen next. Being a generalist specialist gives you some wiggle room in being versatile enough to begin opening up your next niche just as a current trend is heading southward from the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

4. It’s More Fun This Way

Every time I utter this phrase to myself alarm bells start ringing in my head that I am being “too generalist”. But for me at least it’s true.

I find most technology interesting.

Some things more than others. As a desktop-centric computer user, for instance, I’m never particularly crazy about hearing about the latest and greatest smartphone app unless it truly does something useful for the world. That’s because I have a personal bias: I try to minimize my use of the phone and I’m more interested in technology that businesses use. I love Linux and open source — but those are other personal biases.

But within that niche? Many things — from HRM systems through to CRMs and ERPs and VoIP tools — are at least somewhat interesting to me.

Keeping up a diverse client-base is a great way of always keeping things fresh and never — again — falling into the situation of writing about the same thing from dawn until dusk.

There’s a middle-ground between being a generalist and a specialist. I called it being a ‘generalist specialist’ here, but it’s my own terminology.

Whatever you want to refer to it as, spending more time in the middle of the road, or taking a slower path down the generalist -> specialist trajectory has its own advantages that merit consideration.

Are you a proud generalist or an ultra-niche specialist? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

DSR Ghostwriting specializes in long form thought leadership service for clients in the technology sector. For more information, visit: DSRGhostwriting.com.