The Future of Generalist Work

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The important training is not STEM, coding or how AI works. (The market will take care of that.) It’s about how people work—and how businesses so often make money by manipulating people to buy things they might not need. Instead, people can learn how to manipulate themselves .

Rather than compete with computers, people need to learn how to use and... See more

Generalists, with their diverse skills, adaptability, and ethical awareness, are at the vanguard of this new epoch. They aren’t just visionaries but also implementers, merging AI-generated efficiency with human creativity and ethical discernment.