The Power of the “Spiky Profile”: Why I Ditched the Generalist Trap to Become a Specialist

There is a very particular kind of pressure that gets placed on neurodivergent students.

It starts early.

If you are bad at Maths, you need more tutoring.

If English is a struggle, you need more intervention.

If you cannot do things the standard way, the answer is nearly always the same: work harder at becoming more balanced.

The goal, implicitly, is to smooth you out.

To make you less uneven. Less spiky. Less obviously different.

Looking back, I think one of the best decisions I ever made was refusing that path.

When I think about my time at Sixth Form College, I do not see the beginning of a story about becoming more rounded. I see the moment I stopped trying to drag every low point up to an acceptable middle and started taking my strongest spikes seriously.

That changed everything.

And in many ways, it laid the foundations for everything that followed — from university, to public advocacy, to later being shortlisted for a Pride of Britain Award, and eventually to building my work as the founder of Divergent Thinking.

You can read more about that chapter here: Former Barton Peveril Student Shortlisted for Pride of Britain Award

A young professional enthusiastically shakes hands with an elder statesman at an elegant networking event, surrounded by attentive colleagues.

The pressure to become “balanced” can be brutal for neurodivergent people

For a lot of neurodivergent students, school and college are dominated by one message:

your weaknesses are the priority.

The subjects you struggle with become the focus.

The areas where your brain does not fit the system become the urgent issue.

The implied goal is not to understand your cognitive profile more deeply, but to flatten it.

That can be exhausting.

Because many neurodivergent people do not have neat, even profiles. We have what I often describe as a spiky profile: significant difficulty in some areas, and unusually high ability in others.

That is not a defect. It is a pattern.

But traditional education systems often treat that pattern as a problem to smooth out. The energy goes into closing the gaps, even if doing so comes at the cost of the areas where real talent, motivation and potential actually live.

I understand why this happens. Schools want students to meet basic standards. Qualifications matter. The problem is that when “balance” becomes the dominant goal, neurodivergent students can spend years being trained away from their strengths.

For me, Maths and English often felt like locked doors

This is not me saying those subjects have no value. Of course they do.

But for my autistic and dyslexic brain, traditional versions of them often felt inaccessible in a very specific way. A page of algebra or a dense Shakespeare essay did not just feel difficult. It felt like being handed a locked door and being judged for not walking through it.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between challenge that stretches you and challenge that repeatedly tells you your brain is wrong.

For a long time, I internalised that as personal failure. I thought the problem was that I was not disciplined enough, clever enough or hardworking enough in the right ways. I thought I needed to fix those weaknesses in order to become someone viable.

But the deeper truth was simpler:

those formats were not where my mind came alive.

And if I had spent all my energy trying to become respectable in the wrong language, I think I would have come out of education as a frustrated, average version of myself.

College was where the shift began

What changed for me at college was not that my neurodivergence disappeared or that my low points suddenly stopped being difficult.

What changed was that I started to understand something far more useful:

I did not need to build my future around the places my brain struggled most.

I could build around my spikes.

That was a profound shift.

Instead of treating my “lows” as the centre of my identity, I started to notice where I had unusual energy, unusual clarity and unusual skill. I started to ask not, “How do I become more normal across the board?” but, “What am I actually built to do well?”

That question opened a different kind of future.

Choosing Video Production changed the story

For me, choosing Video Production was not just choosing a subject. It was choosing a language.

Until then, so much of education had been asking me to prove my intelligence through formats that constantly magnified my friction. But with video, something different happened.

I could think with images.

I could tell stories visually.

I could solve problems through structure, pacing, editing and creative decisions.

I could communicate ideas in a medium that did not constantly punish the way my brain worked.

That mattered far beyond grades.

It meant that, perhaps for the first time, I was not only being measured through what I found hardest. I was being allowed to work in a space where my visual-spatial thinking, my pattern recognition and my storytelling instincts were not inconveniences — they were assets.

That is a completely different experience of education.

I stopped fighting my brain and started feeding it

This is probably the simplest way I can describe the shift.

For years, so much of my energy had gone into fighting my brain — trying to force it through formats that drained me, shamed me or made me feel behind.

At college, through video production, I started doing something different.

I started feeding it.

I leaned into:

• visual storytelling

• creative structure

• spatial thinking

• editing as problem-solving

• the emotional and social power of narrative

That changed not only what I could produce, but how I felt about myself.

Because confidence often does not come from being endlessly reassured. It comes from experiencing yourself functioning well in a space that actually fits.

A spiky profile is not something to apologise for

I feel very strongly about this now.

A spiky profile means you may never be the person who is solidly average at everything. You may continue to have low spots that are genuinely low. But you may also have top spikes that are far beyond average.

The mistake so many systems make is focusing so heavily on the lows that the spikes never get enough room to develop.

And then everyone loses.

The person loses confidence.

The school loses talent.

The future employer loses innovation.

The wider world loses what that mind might have contributed if it had been properly cultivated.

That is why I no longer believe the answer is always to even neurodivergent people out. Sometimes the answer is to go all-in on the thing they do unusually well.

“Well-rounded” is often overrated

There is a very particular ideal that still dominates education and work: the well-rounded person.

The person who is reasonably good at everything.

The person with no obvious jagged edges.

The person whose competence looks smooth, balanced and transferable.

I understand why that is appealing. But I also think it is overrated.

Because the people who often create the most interesting work, the strongest ideas and the most original contributions are not always well-rounded. They are often pointed. Specific. Intense. Unusually strong in certain domains and far less comfortable in others.

In other words, they are spiky.

And I think the world still underestimates how much value sits in those spikes.

Being a generalist can make you easier to categorise.

Being a specialist gives you a distinctive cognitive signature.

That difference matters.

Specialisation gave me a sense of identity, not just skill

By the time I left college and went on to Bournemouth University, something important had shifted internally.

I no longer saw myself only as the struggling student.

I had started to see myself as someone with a specialism.

That may sound like a small change, but it is not.

There is a profound psychological difference between:

“I am bad at a lot of things”

and

“I have a real area of expertise and strength.”

That second identity gave me confidence. It gave me direction. It helped me think about contribution, not just deficiency. And from there, it became much easier to imagine a future that was not built around trying to be acceptable to the old system.

That future eventually grew into speaking, social entrepreneurship, advocacy and the work I now do through Divergent Thinking.

Neurodivergent people often need permission to specialise

This is one of the reasons I care so much about telling this story.

Many neurodivergent students are surrounded by pressure to become less themselves. Less intense. Less specialised. Less unusual. More evenly competent across the board.

But sometimes what they really need is permission.

Permission to say:

• I do not need to be brilliant at everything

• this subject may matter, but it is not where my future lives

• my spikes are worth taking seriously

• I am allowed to build around strength, not just patch weakness

• I do not need to become generic to become valuable

That permission can be life-changing.

This still matters in the workplace

Although this reflection begins in education, the same issue shows up again later in work.

Many workplaces still reward the appearance of being broadly competent in standard ways, rather than asking where someone’s specific spikes might add unusual value. Neurodivergent people are still often managed around their friction points first, rather than helped to build from their top strengths.

That is one reason workplace needs assessments matter so much to me. They help move the conversation from “How do we make this person more rounded?” to “What is this person actually strong at, where is the friction, and what design changes would let their strengths show up more powerfully?”

That is a much better question.

My advice: do not waste your life trying to become average in the wrong places

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this:

Stop spending all your energy trying to become mediocre in places that will never hold your real power.

That does not mean basic skills do not matter.

It does not mean avoiding challenge.

It does not mean you should never work on a weakness.

But it does mean this:

your future probably does not live in the places where your brain feels most dead.

It lives where it wakes up.

For me, that was video production.

For someone else, it may be coding, mechanics, design, music, data, entrepreneurship, systems thinking, performance, making, writing, building or something else entirely.

But whatever it is, the important thing is to take the spike seriously.

Final thought

Looking back, college was where I began to understand that my life was never going to be built by becoming “well-rounded” enough to satisfy every conventional measure.

It was going to be built by taking my strongest spike seriously enough to become excellent at it.

That was the real shift.

Not becoming less neurodivergent.

Not evening myself out.

Not turning myself into a more acceptable generalist.

But recognising that a spiky profile is not a flaw to smooth down. It can be the very thing that gives your life shape, direction and power.

I did not get anywhere meaningful by being average at Maths.

I got there by letting myself specialise in the things my brain was genuinely built to do.

To explore more of my work as the founder of Divergent Thinking, visit the blog or learn more about workplace needs assessments.