Generally Useful and Specifically Unremarkable.

I came across a line recently that stopped me in my tracks: "Generally useful and specifically unremarkable." It perfectly describes one of the biggest traps in business, sales, leadership and personal development.

We are constantly encouraged to broaden our skills. Learn more. Understand more. Become more rounded. Be able to turn your hand to anything. And there is absolutely value in that.

But there comes a point where breadth stops being an advantage and starts becoming a problem. Because customers do not usually buy breadth.

They buy confidence.

They want to believe that the person sitting opposite them understands their specific problem, their environment, their pressures and the consequences of getting the decision wrong.

That changes the question. Instead of asking "what am I good at?", perhaps we should ask "what problem do I want people to immediately associate me with solving?"

Expertise Reduces Risk

Think about how we choose experts in almost every other part of our lives. If you had a complicated knee problem, you would probably want to see a knee specialist. You would not search for someone who described themselves as being generally good at medicine.

That does not mean the specialist knows nothing about the rest of the human body. Quite the opposite. They understand the wider system, but they have gone deeper in one particular area.

Business works in much the same way. When organisations are spending significant amounts of money, they are trying to reduce risk. One of the easiest ways to reduce that perceived risk is to find someone who has seen the problem before — someone who understands the terminology, the environment, what tends to go wrong, and who can see around corners because they have travelled the road before.

The Danger of Being Too Broad

This is something I increasingly think about in sales. A salesperson who can talk about everything often sounds less credible than someone who understands one customer's problem deeply. The same is true of companies.

The second statement gives you something to hold onto. You immediately understand the problem being solved. That specificity creates credibility. And credibility creates trust.

Of course, there is another extreme. You can become so specialised that there simply is not a large enough market for what you do. The answer is therefore not to become unbelievably narrow. It is to find the intersection between depth and relevance.

Be broad enough to understand the customer's world. Be narrow enough to bring genuine expertise into it.

Know Your Zone

The strongest people I have worked with tend to have something I would describe as their zone — a subject where you can ask them increasingly difficult questions and they do not need to retreat into rehearsed answers.

That is very different from knowing enough to give a presentation. Deep expertise gives you freedom in a conversation. Superficial expertise makes you try to control it.

I think that distinction matters more than ever. We now live in a world where almost anyone can get a reasonable first answer to almost any question in seconds. Information itself is becoming cheaper. Judgement is becoming more valuable. The real differentiator is increasingly not what you know. It is what you understand.

This Matters in Sales Too

One of the biggest mistakes in sales is believing that credibility comes from knowing everything about your product. It does not. Customers do not wake up wanting a product demonstration. They wake up with problems.

The strongest sales conversations happen when you understand those problems better than the customer expected you to. That creates an entirely different relationship. You stop behaving like somebody trying to sell something. You start behaving like somebody capable of helping them solve something. That is a much stronger position.

Specialism Can Actually Make Your Market Bigger

There is also a counterintuitive point here. Becoming known for one thing does not necessarily reduce your opportunities. It can increase them.

Once people associate you with solving a particular problem, they start bringing that problem to you. Colleagues recommend you. Customers introduce you to other organisations. People invite you into conversations earlier. You become the person people think about when that particular issue appears.

What Do You Want to Be Known For?

I have been thinking about this personally. Like many people, my interests cover several areas — technology, sales, leadership, AI, public services, digital transformation. There is a temptation to try to talk about all of them equally. But a list of interests is not a reputation.

Reputation comes from association.

Those are much more interesting questions. Because your reputation is not really what you say about yourself. It is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.

Become Specifically Remarkable

There is nothing wrong with being broadly capable. In fact, it is important. You need enough breadth to understand context, communicate with different people and see how your area connects with everything around it. But breadth should support your expertise. It should not replace it.

The goal is not to become useful at everything. The goal is to become exceptionally useful at something that matters. Understand the wider world. Develop broad commercial judgement. Stay curious. Keep learning. But find the problem you want to become known for solving. Then go deeper than everyone else.