I’m still finding ways to answer the question, “What is a generalist?” more completely. Some people have asked me, “I do X and Y, does that make me a generalist?” And I think it does, to a degree. Generalism-specialism is a spectrum. If you invest yourself in two things that are substantially different from each other, you’re further down the spectrum than a full specialist. And if you have three things, you’re even further down, and so on.
Extreme generalism
We know what extreme specialists look like—they’re easy to point to. But the other end of the spectrum is harder to picture. What does an extreme generalist look like?
Well, I think that’s me. So what I’ve done here is take my own life and erase the specifics of it to get a set of broad categories of human activity. I’ve also added some other categories that I think are valid. What we’re looking for here is the broadest set of categories of “things people do,” where each thing requires actual effort, and the categories are fundamentally different from each other. A person who does something in many or all of those categories would be an extreme generalist.
I make digital art, I do occasional tech projects, I travel, I write about philosophy, I lift weights and/or kickbox, I cook huge meals, I trade on the stock market, I play the drums, and I’m a productivity coach:
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digital art -> Artistic creation. There are tons of ways to make art, I don’t think I need to list them. The pursuit of self-expression and/or beauty is the common thread here.
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tech projects -> Utilitarian creation. This kind of work is creative, like art, but it’s more focused on the usefulness of the result, rather than the beauty of it. I mostly build useful things with code and spreadsheets, but the technology is arbitrary—you could be building furniture, making clay mugs, customizing cars, etc.
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travel -> High-investment leisure. These are things you do just for fun, but that actually take some investment to bring about. Travel is fun but it requires managing money, planning and logistics, and going out of your comfort zone. It’s high-investment-high-reward. Watching TV is not high-investment leisure. Book club is. Fishing is. I’d say the “social media influencer” belongs here as well, because most influencers have to do actual work posting content, earning affiliate partnerships, and finding collaboration opportunities, in order to portray a lifestyle that their audience aspires to.
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philosophy writing -> Philosophy. I mean the broad definition of philosophy, which I’ve used elsewhere. Something like, “Consciously examining thoughts, beliefs, and values.” Maybe there’s an anime series whose themes you often think deeply about. Maybe you love watching psychological thriller movies and then discussing the nature of reality. Maybe you’re religious and you feel it’s important to go deep into the theology of your religion. All of that is philosophy.
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lifting -> Physical fitness. This one is straightforward—any fitness activity in your life. A lot of fitness activities also cover other categories, like dance being creative expression, or skiing being high-investment leisure.
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cooking in bulk -> Cultivation of comfort. Why do I cook for myself? Well, I eat a lot, and restaurants are expensive. But why do I invest energy into doing a good job at it? Obviously because it’s a nice feeling to eat a good meal. In what other areas do people work hard to set up nice environments for themselves? Interior design? Gardening? Raising pets?
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trading -> Financial planning. This means putting effort into managing your money, in one way or another. There are traders, value investors, crypto people, etc. Even the standard “holding broad-market index funds” can be an active focus, if you take the time to study macroeconomics and understand how the broader market behaves.
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drumming -> Music. Very straightforward. Playing instruments, singing, composing, DJ-ing, or producing. This mostly counts as artistic creation, but it deserves its own category because music is just so experientially different from anything else people do.
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coaching -> Teaching/mentoring. It’s one thing to be good at something, but it takes a whole other set of skills to teach it to others. This category includes bloggers and YouTubers who make tutorials and other educational content.
Other categories:
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Scientific research. This is for anyone who’s doing experiments or analysis to learn new, true things about the world. This is not only people who are researchers by trade. Some of the best strides in science have come from people who were simply indulging their curiosity in their free time.
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Social investment. We all have social lives, but here I’m talking about those elite social butterflies who work hard to coordinate events and form connections.
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Art critique. This is anyone who carefully reviews the work of others. This is literary analysis, movie reviews, video game reviews, and so on. They sometimes get a bad rap for “not making things themselves,” but a high-quality review or analysis is useful, valuable work. The reason for the bad reputation is that anybody with a complaint can call themself a “critic” and muddy the waters.
A fully extreme generalist would being doing something in each of those 12 categories. That seems impossible, but with deliberate planning you could certainly do all of the above over your whole lifetime. And you could probably even do one significant thing in each category over the course of, say six years. But that shouldn’t necessarily be your goal.
The point here is just that if we’re trying to imagine what the extreme end of the spectrum looks like, it’s this: somebody who’s involved in every category of human endeavor.
Narrow generalism
There’s another way to be a generalist: you can have multiple efforts within a category. If you play four musical instruments with proficiency, you’re definitely a musical generalist.
You could be a “narrow generalist” in any of those categories. In reading the book Range, I learned that tennis champion Roger Federer grew up as a “generalist athlete,” and the widely-cited professor and researcher Arturo Casadevall is a “generalist scientist.” About half of the people featured in that book are narrow generalists, and the other half are broad generalists who drew connections between very different fields.
“How generalist am I?”
To measure the breadth of your generalism (or your range, as David Epstein would put it), you could just look at how many categories you cover out of the 12. To measure your range within a category, you’d just count up the different projects.
But really, you should be counting all the activities you want to be doing, not just the ones you currently do. Generalism is a personality trait. You may be a generalist who’s unfortunately constrained at the moment.
Some constraints are unavoidable—time is limited, after all, and we all have non-negotiable obligations in our lives. But other constraints can be addressed: maybe with time management, or long-term planning, or facing the fear of failure, or retiring old activities to make room for new ones. That’s one of the things this website is for: helping you overcome all the blocks that are in your power to overcome, to enable you to do all the things you want to.