The Future of Generalist Work

“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.”

Evan Armstrong • Want to Build? Technical Excellence Won’t Be Enough.

Steve Jobs

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

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.

Ruchi Sanghvi • To Go 0 to 1, First Go -1 to 0

On that note: hot off the presses is yet another study making the case that optimizing for youth sports performance undermines longer-term development. I highlight that specific theme because I think it’s the fundamental idea that runs through every page of Range (but that would have made for a less snazzy subtitle): short- and long-term... See more

David Epstein • Caitlin Clark's Not-So-Surprising Childhood

Another study on the power of generalist work

Collapse the talent stack every chance you get .

As I reflect on the teams I’ve led and hundreds of start-ups I’ve worked with, there is a consistent unfair competitive advantage i’ve witnessed when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer... See more

scott belsky • Tweet

Hiring generalists collapses the talent stack, thereby improving decision making and synthesis of information, and giving companies to act quickly when time and resources are limited.

Mastery is not only about getting better at your craft, but also about finding ways to eliminate the obstacles, distractions, and other annoyances that prevent you from working on your craft.

Top performers find ways to spend as much time as possible on what matters and as little time as possible on what doesn't. It is not someone else's... See more

Superhuman

What is generalist mastery? Connecting the right dots, realizing that some dots matter and other dots don’t. Not every dot should be connected.

Job titles are just the most visible ladder of them all. It’s interesting that pompous executive job titles were invented during the Victorian era. This is when we started the trend of calling a cleaner a hygiene technician. A bin man became a waste management and disposal technician. Later on, a call-center worker became a communications... See more

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth

Generalists have shirked the the notion of a true job title to fit their work and have followed the thread of providing value and making an impact. No wonder there’s a group of talented professionals hiding in plain sight given how constricting the traditional job titles have become in affirming our professional worth.

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

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