The Future of Generalist Work
Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.
paulgraham.com • How to Do What You Love
These passion job organizations are burnout factories. Every year, a new crop of eager recruits comes in, grateful to have landed a job doing work “they love” — and every year, a significant percentage of the existing workforce churns out. Some have been there that single year, others for five. They leave not because they’re not good “fits” for the... See more
Anne Helen Petersen • When Your Profession is On Fire
Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing:
“The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.”
Generalists have the advantage of interdisciplinary knowledge, which fosters creativity and a firmer understanding of how the world works. They have a better overall perspective and can generally perform second-order thinking in a wider range of situations than the specialist can.
Shane Parrish • The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled
Very, very many people at Stripe today are doing a quite different job to the one that they join for. In order to do that they've often had to learn a lot and stretch themselves into new areas.
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)
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.
Superhuman
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
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
Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic
While frameworks can offer valuable perspectives and guide decision-making, rigid adherence to them can lead to tunnel vision and unhelpful outcomes. Successful decision-making often requires a blend of framework-guided analysis and intuitive judgment, where the needs of both the business and the customer are carefully considered.
Lenny Rachitsky • Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour
I don’t think that means we don’t need specialists. But as eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson said, we need both frogs and birds. The frogs are down in the mud looking at the granular details of everything. The birds are up above and don’t see those details, but they can see multiple frogs and can integrate work. What he said is, our... See more