Let’s face it, generalists get a bad rep. In a world of specialists worship, collecting academic titles, and linear corporate career trajectories, who wants to out themselves as a generalist? I mean, what can they be even useful for? After all, it’s widely known that “a jack of all trades, is a master of none”.

Well, first of all, wrong. That quote originally went like “jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. There you have it, there is clearly an upside.

Of course there is. It’s just hard to grasp in a culture that is so obsessed with measuring, comparing, and optimizing. Not just things. People. There are job titles with highly specific requirements. There are performance reviews based on predetermined markers. There are thousands of books on how to become even more focused and thus productive. It’s a world that pretends it can know it all, control for everything, and plan their lives and businesses that any communist would be proud of.

And for an incredible amount of people, that seems to work pretty well. But then there are the inevitable misfits. On the Kolbe spectrum, you’d characterize them as high QuickStart. People who innately need new things in their lives. Constantly. It’s not about being needy, it’s not about being unfocused, or evading safe life decisions. It’s all about their, my, inner nature of craving newness. Forever. And by that, we never become specialists. We just don’t stick around for long enough.

I have a physics degree. My grandma, who had to leave school after 8th grade, is of course upset that I don’t use it. But even while studying it, I couldn’t stick to one topic. Instead, I was the person who took almost every single, strange class the department had to offer. Always looking for the one. You know, that one area of interest that all my friends had already found and were conducting research in. Of course, no such luck.

I’ll be honest with you, it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to always feel like I have to justify why I suddenly abandon another promising career. Why I can’t just “stick with it”, like my parents and grandparents and friends and what seems like the rest of the world. But I can’t. The Kolbe has finally given me permission to be really honest about that. I can’t become master of one, or even master of a few things. I will forever float between all that life has to offer.

But there’s an upside to that. I’ll never get stuck in my comfort zone. Instead, I’ll keep searching, most likely improving my chances at personal happiness. I’ll be incredibly hard to replace with AI, like very very hard; specialists, not so much, their jobs are much closer to being understood by rules and repetitive computations. And I, and all my fellow generalists, we will be the life-saving bees to your flower field of a company. Crosspollinating knowledge between information silos, because we most likely have a pretty good understanding of them all. The natural innovators, keeping you and the rest of the employees on their creative toes, making sure we all stay innovative enough in these fast-changing times.

As the future becomes more and more unpredictable due to rapid technical and social changes, there is one type of people who will go happily along with that. Generalists. It’s exactly their type of game. As cheesy as it sounds, but we are literally born ready for this. So let’s update that old saying a bit, shall we? “Jack of all trades, master of none, but in a world of accelerating change the ones who get things done”.

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From Daily Shot of Insight, June 6, 2021

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