![]() ![]() What you can do though, is tune your spidey-senses and try to filter out the noise, by looking at the bigger picture: What is the industry’s general direction? How can you anticipate the shifts? How equipped are you and your team to pivot and adapt, if the ground beneath your feet just disappears from one day to the next? One moment you could be developing something unique and exciting, and the next an announcement by a major tech player can render it obsolete, or irrelevant. Trying to stay up to speed is one thing, but really gathering a deep understanding of everything would probably require a few lifetimes (and would, technically, make you a specialist, sorry). It’s physically and mentally exhausting-not to mention next to impossible-to try and comprehend every single aspect, of every single technological change out there. Well, if you’re a generalist, you’ve probably already understood by now that you can’t. So, how can you cope with a landscape that is in constant motion, expanding in all directions (or dimensions, if you will), at the pace of a supercharged toddler going through childhood at mind-boggling speeds? The generalist approach to extended reality industry It’s all very exciting at first, but it can get really tiring, really soon, when you’re constantly trying to play catch-up. And, with every new announcement, development, headset, or SDK, all of them struggle to keep up the pace. Almost every single business that works in extended reality didn’t exist just 5 years ago. How do you survive in an ever-changing extended reality environment?īut, what happens if the environment you find yourself in keeps changing constantly? We’ve been entranced by the constant VR technology leaps, for example, that we oftentimes forget that the vast majority of people have yet to experience their first immersive journey in the virtual realm. They all come from different backgrounds, carrying over various specialties and skills from a variety of fields, mostly from well-defined environments and industries. Even though extended reality is a fairly new industry, taking its first toddler steps in search for a wider audience, its people are not. Various tasks competing against each other for dominance and stability. Retail design architects, iOS app designers, Facebook Ads Specialists, you get the idea. The creative and marketing industries have always been kind of an outlier regarding these conditions, but in recent decades we’ve seen an overspecialization there, as well. By making specialization a key for a successful career prospect, constantly pushing for overly specific tasks, one could sometimes only apply if they were truly specialized in that one item of work. Modern jobs (as in post-industrialist ones) have amplified the dichotomy between generalism and specialism. ![]() Historically though, humans-as a species-have always been generalists adapting in every situation, making the most of their environment. We tend to map these behaviors to humans as well, from plain old zoomorphism to more complex philosophical statements, like Isaiah Berlin’s conceptual framework, composed of foxes and hedgehogs. The latter, adapt by creating a specific niche which they fill, structuring their livelihood around learning to do one thing great. The former are the ones that don’t have a preferred food source (or prey) and rely on their ability to adapt to various environments and conditions. You see, animal species have long been put somewhere along a spectrum, ranging from ‘broad generalists’ to ‘extreme specialists’ and everything in between. ![]() ![]() Nature has a pretty interesting way of figuring out whether a species will thrive, or not: it always comes down to how efficiently they can survive in a given environment. ![]()
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