The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled

massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition. Like golfers, surgeons improve with repetition of the same procedure. Accountants and bridge and poker players develop accurate intuition through repetitive experience. Kahneman pointed to those domains’ “robust statistical regularities.” But when the rules are altered just sli

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in the process of focusing, we lose sight of the context – the rhythms, patterns and cycles – within which that fragment exists and functions. So we fragment the whole into isolated bits and pieces.

Generalists are important at observing everything and seeking out a particular something that is most relevant for specialists to pursue. A generalist is a divergent thinker who is in touch with a large realm of possibilities.

As one studies the lives of some renowned ‘specialists’, it appears that they often have a number of avocational pursuits (prior careers or hobbies) that in some way or another influenced – or in many cases facilitated – their main endeavour. In many cases they themselves admit to this. It is therefore worth questioning whether those we automatical

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