Generalists Archives - One Honest Indie

Hey, I told you this is a great book, right? Well, I got to read you these passages because they’re just fantastic and very inspiring. Let’s see.

Told in retrospect for popular media, stories of innovation and self-discovery can look like orderly journeys from A to B. Sort of like how inspirational snippet accounts of the journeys of elite athletes appear straightforward, but the stories usually get murkier when examined in depth or over time. The popular notion of the Tiger path (specialization early) minimizes the role of detours, breadth, and experimentation. It is attractive because it is a tidy prescription, low on uncertainty and high on efficiency. After all, who doesn’t like a head start? Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.

Hi, I’m reading this right now, Range by David Epstein. And I got to tell you, there’s stuff in here that is just like so encouraging. It’s a book about the benefits of being a generalist. And I’m a generalist in many ways. So, yeah, this thing i was reading here that i really liked was about a woman who had started her professional career in her 50s and went on to become a big leader in the Girl Scouts.

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.

It is a natural philosophy for someone who was sixty when she attempted to turn down an interview for the job that became her calling. She had no long-term plan, only a plan to do what was interesting or needed at the moment. “I never envisioned” is her most popular preamble.

Hesselbein’s professional career, which started in her midfifties, was extraordinary. The meandering path, however, was not.

So this notion that you can just, you know, take a few steps, that everything can work out if you just follow a prescribed plan is ridiculous, because you never know what’s going to work. And part of.doing something, succeeding at something, is being willing to fail.

Because another point this book makes is that generalists have a tendency to switch interests. People who succeed early at something because that’s all they’ve ever focused on do not necessarily do well under changing conditions. Generalists, on the other hand, have a tendency to adapt better. And that’s another point made in here.

The nonfiction writer and filmmaker Sebastian Junger was twenty-nine and working as an arborist, harnessed in the upper canopy of a pine tree, when he tore open his leg with a chainsaw and got the idea to write about dangerous jobs. He was still limping two months later when a fishing vessel out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he lived, was lost at sea. Commercial fishing provided his topic; the result was The Perfect Storm. Junger stuck with the theme of dangerous jobs, and made the Oscar-nominated war documentary, Restrepo.

“That cut was the best thing that ever could have happened to me,” he told me. “It gave me this template for seeing my career. Virtually every good thing in my life I can trace back to a misfortune, so my feeling is you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad when things happen. You do not know. You have to wait to find out.”

So that really, I gotta say that resonated with me. Yeah, so, I mean, there are just so many wonderful points made in this book about being a generalist and how you don’t have a prescribed path for success. That’s what it comes down to. And the struggle is part of what makes you a success. That’s the thing. You need to struggle just enough to have a mind that is properly, I guess, devoted toward whatever it is you’re supposed to do. And it just works out sometimes. But it works out because you try things and you’re willing to possibly fail at them.

So… one of the things I want to say about this community I’d like to form is that this isn’t about getting a 12-step program. This is about dealing with things. This is about how do we advance ourselves. This is about asking questions of yourself, what it is you really want, what you have to offer, and what you would like from others. It should be a mutual thing, not just, “Gee, I’m just going to talk about the weather.” You can do that on Facebook or Twitter or some other place. Some other place where nobody cares how you’re doing and all they can do is look at their Amazon rank and go, “Oh look, I’m at number 10. Yay for me!”

Okay. Not to be too snarky about it, but really. And … “I have, oh, 10,000 followers now on Instagram!” Oh boy, my life is just a dream. Yeah, right.

Okay. That’s all I’m saying. So be seeing you. Take care. Adios for now. Be seeing you.

By the way, I might be making a film a lot sooner than I thought.

And it’s terrifying me.

Yeah. You just never know.