The Future of Generalist Work
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?
Brie Wolfson • Good Cogs and Their Tools
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.
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
The magic that MSCHF makes with generalists is the stuff of legend
Mihika likens the role of a 0-to-1 team within a large company to that of Hestia in Greek mythology, who is the “keeper of the hearth.” It is Hestia’s job to always keep the hearth burning, even while other gods go out on separate quests. This means always keeping the 0-to-1 project alive and helping it spread to others, mostly through setting... See more
Lenny Rachitsky • Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)
The person who focuses on one task and sees it through to completion—even if they work in a somewhat slow or outdated manner—beats the endless optimizer who jumps from tool to tool and always hopes a new piece of technology will help them finish what they start.
James Clear • 3-2-1: On seizing the day, perseverance, and focusing on one task at a time
This has been the core question I’ve sat with for the last decade—how to balance money and meaning on the entrepreneurial path. And there are three archetypal ways that I’ve seen people approach the question:
- The deferred life plan
- Being bivocational
- Choosing to integrate
Casey Rosengren • The 3 Ways to Balance Money and Meaning
Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:
- We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.
- We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed
Ted Gioia • The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College
The Imperfectionist: Doing things is what counts
ckarchive.com“Here’s what I mean: everyone seems to yearn for the productivity technique or life philosophy or set of personal rules that will cause them to do more writing, launch a business, be a better listener, or finally start meditating. But nothing beats actually doing a bit of the thing to reinforce to yourself that you’re capable of making progress on it. The best way to convince a five-year-old that enjoyable leisure doesn’t require addictive technology is to spend a few hours demonstrating that it doesn’t; and the best way to prove to yourself that you can add words to the manuscript of your novel is to add a few.”
Top tier executive assistants are great at many things but have critical core operational tasks and simply don’t have the wide strategic business context required for CoS-style work.
Michael Houck • Understanding Cost Of Sales | Blog - Houck's Newsletter
As I discovered, talent and drive aren’t enough. If anything, talent can make finding ideas feel more daunting because it increases the number of available opportunities.