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.
1. Idea Synthesis
Generalists tend to be good at combining knowledge from different fields into new concepts, or applying concepts from one field to another in a novel way. This brings about invention and innovation, and it’s probably the most obvious strength of generalists.
Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings of humans were improved by his interest in anatomy and his experimental dissection of cadavers. Steve Jobs’ knowledge of design and typesetting led him to create user-friendly products that revolutionized personal computing. And so on.
2. Rapid Learning
A pure specialist might be a beginner in something only once in their life—soon they’ve mastered the basics and move on to fine-tuning, building good habits, managing their psychology, etc. But generalists are more accustomed to being novices—every time they spark a new interest, they have to be a beginner again. I think that’s why “Learner” was the highest Clifton Strengths category among generalists.
The only skill you can always take with you, from one interest to another, is the meta-skill: your ability to learn skills. Generalists get to exercise this muscle more than the average person, and this lets them thrive in dynamic environments where continuous learning is necessary.
3. Empathy
Generalists have an easy time connecting with a broad set of individuals and cultures. By “cultures” I don’t necessarily mean those in foreign countries. I mean all the little subcultures you might encounter in your daily life.
For me: I studied physics in school and have had a career in Big Tech since then. I enjoy programming; I enjoy analyzing things by their parts; I have a materialist understanding of reality. Now, what is my opinion toward artists, who live in SoHo lofts and paint all the time? They’re my people too, and I relate to them directly, because I’m into art as well. And even the forms of art that I’m not particularly good at, I understand and appreciate.
To invest in and appreciate many different subcultures gives one a better picture of what’s common between them—the essentials of human nature. It enables you to see through the cultural specifics and find those essentially-human traits and experiences, and understand them more readily. It shrinks your outgroup, which is a bigger topic than belongs here.
4. Adaptability
Generalists are all, to some degree, chameleons. If you apply yourself to two wildly different things, then there are probably at least two wildly different social circles that you fit into. And you might even feel there are a corresponding two different versions of yourself.
Because of multiple group memberships, generalists are likely to hold multiple ways of thinking, multiple communication styles, multiple sets of social norms, etc. All of this is conducive to adapting to novel environments.
5. Avoiding Efficient Competition
Generalists have unique combinations of skills, and that can open up opportunities to do unique jobs that not many people are fit for. Occupying a very niche job is good for job security and labor value.
By contrast, standard jobs that require a single narrow skillset are subject to efficient competition, meaning it’s very straightforward to measure a worker’s competence, so workers have to compete fiercely with each other to stay valued.
6. Analogical Thinking
Generalists are good at analogical thinking—that is, taking a mental model from one field and applying it to another, in hopes of understanding the other field better.
A planet in orbit is like a ball swinging from a string. The way ideas spread through a culture is similar to how animals survive and reproduce and evolve. Electric currents flow through conductors like fluids flow through pipes. Time is like a direction in space that we’re all moving through at a constant speed. Your relationship to your future self is like the relationship between a manager and employee in an organization. And so on.
Analogies help you conceptually grasp a novel situation—to identify the important concepts and use those concepts in a mental model that gives you a deeper understanding of how the system works. This method has historically led to countless breakthroughs in human knowledge.
Generalists have a wider pool of experience from which to pull analogies. By default, they’re using more mental models day-to-day. You could say analogies open up new dimensions of thought. When you’re hitting an obstacle head-on—just continually backing up and hitting it again—an analogy lets you go sideways. The more analogies you can apply, the more dimensions you can “move” in.
7. Avoiding Trapped Thinking
I once wrote a bit about how we partialize our sensory experience, reducing a huge amount of raw information to a relatively small set of concepts that our conscious minds can handle. That set of concepts is mostly determined by the set of words we know. Practically, it’s also determined by which concepts are familiar to us.
Different fields of work and study make you see the world differently. Each one gives you a unique set of concepts, and the more time you spend in that environment, the more comfortable you are applying those concepts as the “interpretation layer” between your raw sensory experience and your thoughts.
For example, if you’re a software engineer, there is a way of experiencing the world that is characteristic of software engineering. It’s evident in how software engineers talk to each other—not just about software engineering, but about anything. And it’s not just a particular vocabulary; the concepts behind the words are unique and characteristic.
-
Maybe you’ll sometimes think of people as nodes in a graph. You see real-life situations as “systems” and you think about their “inputs” and “outputs.” When someone asks you a question you notice the “data type” of information they’re requesting. You notice the rules the system abides by. You notice hierarchies in relationships.
Every trade is like this. It only becomes obvious when you get into more than one concept-space. If you have multiple social groups, and they’re of truly different subcultures, you notice how they can have the “same” experience but process it completely differently.
This also affects how you find knowledge and form beliefs, and that’s where it’s especially dangerous to be trapped in a single mode of thinking. From the Range review:
Epstein describes the US Challenger disaster. Key decision makers gravely misunderstood what a “factor of safety” meant, they decided to launch the shuttle despite some warning signs on their equipment, the shuttle was destroyed, and then famous physicist Richard Feynman yelled at everyone. But Epstein reveals an angle that I’d missed the first time I’d heard this story.
Part of the reason NASA went ahead with the launch despite “warning signs” was that they had a systematically data-driven culture, and the warning signs were not quantified in any data. “The O-rings did something weird in the test, and although the equipment didn’t fail the test, it was unexpected. What if they do something unexpected again, but worse?” That kind of objection ran up against a culture of, “Nice idea, come back to us when you’ve got data.”
You can imagine how well a data-only culture had worked for NASA, and how much waste it had successfully dismissed. But it blinded them to a black-swan-type threat.
It’s an example of one particular way-of-knowing (post-war-modernist, data-driven techno-optimism) being useful for most things but failing in a critical case, where another way-of-knowing (physical-materialist pragmatism) would have succeeded. In the grand scheme, these worldviews are not even very different (both could be reduced to “STEM nerd”!), but the inability of one to see reality through the lens of the other led to a catastrophe.
All mental models are wrong, but some are useful. If you spend too much time in the same concept space, you forget that it’s there. The lens through which you’re looking becomes invisible, like how when you look at a video on a screen, you forget that there’s a screen, or that it’s a digital video.
Generalists have a better chance of getting familiar with multiple different concept spaces, thus noticing the differences between them, and thus noticing the limitations of each.
Conclusion
So there, generalists. These are our advantages, that I know of. Take it as a source of encouragement and inspiration, this unique set of gifts that we have.