The Future of Generalist Work

When you make changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, you’ll have to cross a moat of low status—a period where you are bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because anyone who can cross it has a real advantage.... See more

Most ideas fail, but some will still create value for you even in failure.

An idea that allows you to acquire skills, experience, and build assets regardless of its ultimate success, is worth investing in.

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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“Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

Keep a curiosity inbox. Whenever you get a new idea, write it down in a specific note or on a dedicated page in your notebook. Then, each time the idea pops back into your mind, give it a mark or increase its rating. Over time, you’ll develop a ranked list of ideas based on your long-term interests. This strategy allows you to continue exploring... See more

the people who can start things will be the major beneficiaries in the coming years, because the barrier is no longer knowledge or skills, it’s courage.

It’s time we rebuild the rhythms of our organizations around the substantive bits instead of the knee-jerk ones. What happened to virtues like discipline, contemplation, care, and reflection in our work lives?

Each drop is creative and rebellious, winking to the world that capitalism is a necessary joke. They do all of this with a team of 34 people, most of whom are generalists with no background in making physical goods.