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.

Latest blog posts

  • Announcing True Generalist Substack

    I’ve set up a Substack mirror for the True Generalist blog, located at truegeneralist.substack.com. So, if you’re more comfortable using Substack to keep up with blogs and newsletters, you can subscribe to that instead of the True Generalist website.

  • Generalist strengths: 7 things generalists are best at

    Generalist strengths: Here I list the broad categories of strengths and advantages that generalists are likely to enjoy in life. This is based on what I read in Range, some survey data from GeneralistWorld, and my personal experience.

  • 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.”…

  • 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?

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.