Is There Such a Thing as Too Much SME?
While it’s doubtful you can ever know too much about your subject matter, there is such a thing as the “can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome: you focus so much on “knowing” that you lose sight of “doing” and ultimately fail as a professional.
My recollection of my law school classmates is that many of the star academics never achieved much as lawyers, several actually drifting off into completely different endeavours because they could not get traction as lawyers. The Gold Medallist stayed on the family farm and never entered practice (not to say this was a bad thing!)
Conversely, plenty of average law school students entered the profession and were stellar, particularly in litigation and other “interaction” areas of practice. Law, like any other profession, is at least as much about hands-on savvy as it is about subject matter expertise.
Particularly if you want to be a specialist, and especially if that specialty is esoteric, you need to have bags and bags of subject matter expertise. But even in those cases, you need to have the aptitude to apply the SME, and in most cases, to explain it.
So, yes, having huge amounts of subject-matter expertise can be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t really count for much if you are just a walking library. It’s in the application of your giftedness that you fulfil your destiny as a valuable professional.