Career content online will constantly — and unconsciously — tell you to master your craft, to specialize deeper, because expertise is the path to promotions and raises.
In reality, this thinking is completely wrong. You should never let your job title limit or define who you are.
The correct logic is: companies exist to make money → your expertise helps the company make money → the company hires you.
In other words, if your skills can’t generate revenue for the company, it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. And if they can, whether you’re a polished “specialist” or not is completely irrelevant.
Professional skills only matter at the lower and middle tiers. Once you reach the upper-middle level, your core value shifts from technical skill to industry experience. At the executive level, it shifts again — from industry experience to capital control: strategic decision-making, people management, and resource allocation.
This is the process of liberating yourself from being a unit of production.
Many employees go off course in their careers precisely because they’re blinded by the concept of “profession.” They cling to their small patch of expertise, and after years of grinding, all they’ve become is a low-level specialist with a practiced hand.
When you treat yourself as nothing more than a production input, you hit a ceiling — because human output has a natural limit. Once you reach that limit, advancement simply stops.