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