a bottle with a message in it on the beach

True Generalist blog

Browse all the blog posts here. Hub pages organize posts around certain themes.

Hub pages

Necessary generalists

There are some things that pretty much everybody should dabble in: fields where everybody should have, say, roughly two university courses' worth of knowledge. So we're all "necessary generalists," in the sense that we need to have these few things covered, even if we'd rather put all our focus into a single separate thing.

The generalist’s skillset

This hub page is about the meta-skills that all generalists should have—skills to help keep their lives in balance and avoid common pitfalls. This is a list of the skills and mindsets that I've found necessary to use myself, and I'll add to it in the future as more ideas come up or are suggested to me by others.

Latest blog posts

  • Be Incorporated

    This post is for overthinkers. Really it’s about a specific kind of overthinking; we could call it “over-managing.” It’s when you know what you should be working on at a given time, but instead of doing the work, you continue to deliberate over big-picture / planning decisions. I call this pattern of thought the “Manager.”…

  • How to hide from efficient competition

    Having clear performance metrics is very good for, well, performance. But in the broader picture of your life and career, efficient competition can be a bad thing. Generalists are well suited to find illegible markets to work in. The more narrow your niche, the closer you are to occupying a monopoly, where you (or your…

  • Generalists and AI

    Generalists are uniquely poised to benefit from recent breakthroughs in AI tools. Use AI models to carry out the specific parts of your project that aren’t your forte. Generalists can be “casual CEOs” of their own projects by employing an AI staff to do part of the work.

  • Book review: Range by David Epstein

    Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is a book about generalists. And it’s pretty much the only popular book about generalists today. The book’s main conclusions are that 1) people with range, especially early in their careers, do better in the long run, and 2) organizations with range in their constituents also do…

  • False Generalists

    Some “generalists” are really natural specialists who suffer from fears or weird pressures that cause them to behave like generalists. So we wonder, “Am I living like a generalist because it’s in my nature, or am I doing it in reaction to something negative?” Are you a True Generalist, deep down?

  • Am I a generalist?

    I’m still finding ways to answer the question, “What is a generalist?” more completely. It’s helpful to define what an extreme generalist would look like, so we can then see how similar we are to it. I’ve come up with 12 “categories of human endeavor,” and I define a hypothetical “extreme generalist” as someone whose…

  • Micro-retirements

    Micro-retirements

    Generalists sometimes need to take things “off the table” in their lives, sometimes permanently. A micro-retirement is the letting go of a single activity in your life to make room for other things. I’ve found that using the mindset of retirement is more acceptable, psychologically, than “forcing myself to quit” or something like that. “Quitting”…

  • Necessary generalists: Philosophical self-defense

    What everybody needs, most of all, is the ability to reject “bad philosophy.” And philosophy is most worthwhile as a means to that end. When you start to consciously dabble in philosophy, what’s most important is that you go all the way through: get familiar a lot of different philosophies that contradict each other. Then you return…

  • Necessary generalists: Financial planning (gambling)

    In a relatively free-market financial system, the way you grow your wealth is by risking it. This is inherently dangerous, but that danger can be mitigated with knowledge and experience. Broad-market index funds have performed well in the past but carry some hidden risks that may warrant dabbling in more creative investment strategies.

  • Necessary generalists: Physical health

    You should know your body very very well. The modern world is full of unique health hazards that we did not evolve to handle. And modern medicine, while extremely powerful, has critical gaps that we currently need to account for at the individual level.

  • True Generalist blog

    True Generalist blog

    Browse all the blog posts here. Hub pages organize posts around certain themes.