Developing Arm vs Stem

I enjoyed an excellent podcast on @seradio with John Sonmez on Marketing Yourself and Managing Your Career

One of the items that hit home was John’s advice to make your skills look like the letter “T”

or more accurately the letter inverted ┴

Be competent at a broad base of skills and outstanding at one.  Use that one area as a beach head for marketing oneself and expanding one’s expertise.

Doing a little research, I learned from fontshop that the “stem” is the main vertical in the letter “T”

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And the “arm” is the horizontal stroke.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Working in the startup space, or at least very small startups, I find one tends to develop a broad, strong “arm” at the expense of the “stem” as the breadth of tasks to be accomplished at speed exceeds the need for depth in any single area.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So, I intend to set the goal of growing my stem this year.  It will likely be something around text processing.   TBD</div>