The Future of Generalist Work

Every. Single. One. of the startups that I've worked with have some

co-founder (or early team) dynamic that implicitly shapes their lasting culture.

These practices may be well-known and honored, or they may be hard-coded yet unspoken (like the pie in my story above). Either way, they are a part of the company’s DNA — its nature.

As an Ops Leader,... See more

many of society’s most pressing challenges – such as climate change – require highly creative problem-solving that crosses multiple domains, and polymaths may be the best people to find those solutions.

We’ve created this world where left brain people are free to act on their fairly narrow rational behaviors without being policed. Whereas the burden of proof demanded of a creative act is literally 20 times greater. – Rory Sutherland

Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest...The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.

That’s what -1 to 0 feels like: messy, confusing—squiggly. The hardest part is escaping. What ultimately leads you out of the mess is conviction, a state you must build incrementally and internally. And conviction and certainty are not the same.

For many people, -1 to 0 is also about deciding how you want to work. In a startup? In a big team? As a... See more

Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:

1. We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.


2. We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed

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The tools that are available to each of us are so powerful, so varied and so complex that even the free ones are ignored or misunderstood. We’re too busy doing work to get much done.

And so we end up with the convenient and sexy tools (like the smartphone you might be reading this on) and fail to do the few hours or days of training we might need to... See more