Specialising vs generalising
Deciding what to focus on
I got lots of replies to last week’s email, sharing great apps and resource for information management, so thank you! It seems a lot of people are pretty interested in this and know much more than I do.
This has inspired me to crowd-source wisdom further in an attempt to solve a personal quandary I’m having at the moment. I’ll explain the issue I’m having:
Specialising vs generalising
I’m trying to balance the amount of content that I make (as blogs or on YouTube) which is for a general audience with that which appeals to a narrower audience.
I want to keep growing my online ‘following’ and I think making more general videos may help with this. But I also want to keep creating valuable content, and a lot of my knowledge and experience is in quite niche areas – the machine learning for healthcare course that I just recorded is one example of this.
I have the perception that even for my more niche content (such as technical details around applying machine learning to healthcare) to reach it’s desired audience, it would be helpful for my general audience to be larger – even if they’re not all interested in that specific niche.
There’s definitely an element of chicken-and-egg; of wanting a large enough audience for my work to be found.
So right now I’m in two minds. One is to make more general-audience content (such as coding projects, productivity tips, etc), while the other is to double-down more on content that I know will appeal to medics interested in tech and AI.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! What sort of content would you most like to see? Should I not focus on my audience size? Would you still follow a YouTube channel that shares some content that isn’t relevant for you?
This week’s links:
(1) A tool for annotating web pages
I have been dreaming about a tool like this quite a while, and now it exists! It works as a browser extension, which lets you highlight and make notes on web pages, which you can then refer to later.
(2) Why we should homeschool (Blogs and videos)
I came across Ana Lorena Fabrega this week - she’s a former school teacher who makes videos and blogs about homeschooling and the future of education. I’m being increasingly convinced that this is the way forward for parents who are in the position to do so.
(3) What do medical students actually need to know about artificial intelligence? (an article)
This is a great article in Nature Digital Medicine.
This week’s video
In this video, I share how I streamlined my overall approach to job applications. This is the approach that I recently used to transition from working as doctor to a full-time data scientist role.
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About Me
Hi! I’m Chris Lovejoy, a Junior Doctor and Data Scientist based in London.
I’m on a mission to improve healthcare through technology (particularly AI / machine learning), but along the way I want to share learnings that are relevant no matter your career choice or background.
In this weekly newsletter, I share my top thoughts and learnings from each week, as well as links to the best things on the internet that I come across.