Once upon a time, it was a career landmine to be a jack-of-all-trades.
Pursuing this path meant you’d lack depth and expertise. Accumulating ‘junior’ level knowledge for many things, as you take one step in twenty directions.
But now the tides have turned.
It seems that being a Generalist is now all the rage.
A few cleverly worded prompts, and you can get a custom learning curriculum for any topic in the world. You can spin up an agent to handle a job that someone else should do. All your busywork can be automated, so you can focus on more deep and creative tasks.
From the outside, it just seemed like no matter what task you put in front of a Generalist, even if they had never done it before, they somehow figure out a way and made it look effortless.
They could have their hand in five different things, stay on top of every detail and flawlessly execute without skipping a beat.
And now with AI, Generalists have essentially been handed performance enhancing drugs that allow them to scale their impact at compounding rates.
I always thought these people were modern day polymaths. People who had mastery levels of depth over a wide variety of different things.
That these people were just built different from the rest of us. Perhaps struck by lightning that rewired their neural pathways or born with genius level IQ’s.
Across my career, I’ve met a handful of these people and realised that they’re no different to us at all.
In fact, being a Generalist is much more simpler than you think and is something that anyone can become.