This post lays out a broad set of challenges that generalists are likely to face in life. It doesn't spell out all the solutions, because that's really what the rest of True Generalist is for. But I hope you read something you resonate with, and perhaps feel validated for it.
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: 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.
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." By contrast, the "Employee" does most of the hands-on work without worrying about the big picture, thanks to the Manager's direction. As productive generalists, we have to be good Managers, but we also need to be able to call the plan "good enough" and be the Employee.
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 product) can't be replaced by an alternative.
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.
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 better. Since I started this whole blog around being a generalist, Range was kind of required reading for me.
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?
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 efforts touch on all of them.
The modern world is fertile ground for generalists. There has never been a better time to invest in side projects, try new things, solve new problems!