It's a good time to be a generalist

A couple of months ago my esteemed colleague Barry wrote a great piece about being a generalist, and why they’re great at being community builders. I’m definitely a generalist, and done some community building stuff, so the post hit home.

I like being a generalist - I dabble in event management, design, copywriting, podcasting, software development, social media, etc. I think I would struggle to do just one or two of those things on a daily basis - although I super appreciate people who focus down, and will talk about that at the end of the post.

Barry’s post got me thinking about how it feels like it’s a good time to be a generalist, and what has enabled that. To me, one of the biggest shifts in terms of what I can do as an individual has been enabled by software, particular tools that have simplified processes that have been historically complicated.

For instance, I can throw together brand assets using Canva or Figma in a few minutes - I’ve used photoshop before and the results where always pretty mediocre. At my last role, I put together a ten part educational video series using Veed and my phone as a camera - again with decorative assets made in Canva. Tools like Squarespace or Wix allow people who can’t code to put together websites fairly easily. You could start a new venture, complete with a website, brand, and content in a fraction of the time it used to take.

These software tools are all useful tools in a generalist’s tool belt, that mean you can spend less time on the “doing” bit and more time thinking holistically about the output of your work.

And there’s a shift coming that I think is only going to give generalists more ability to create. Warning: AI hype alert. All of the tools I mentioned are adding some sort of AI functionality - eg automatically generate social assets, auto-editing a podcast, or creating copy for an event. Sora allows you to create (slightly weird looking) videos from a text prompt. For better or for worse we’re entering a world of allowing individuals to do more*.* The ultimate extreme Silicon Valley expression of this was perhaps summed up by Sam Altman of OpenAI’s belief that there will be a billion dollar company run by one person at some point - running on autopilot with AI branding, marketing, engineering etc. Will this happen? I don’t know. But it’s an interesting thought experiment.

AI hype aside, one side point about it being a good time for generalists is that it’s also a good time to be building products for generalists. I mentioned some of the tools I use above, but there’s a wealth of opportunity across all disciplines to help generalists do what they need to do. Making it easier for individuals with a vision to create interesting new things (or just manage their lives) is huge business now.

The flipside of this shift is what this means for quality work - I feel like with many websites or brands I look at, I can now spot exactly what tool they were built with, or even what template they used. They kind of look the same, sometimes a bit soulless. Lowering the barrier to entry does not mean we’re all suddenly designers or event organisers - there’s of course so much more to the craft involved with these. And I think what will set aside really quality products or experiences will be that they know their limits in terms of what a generalist can achieve - and when to call in the experts.

I still don’t know if I’m going to specialise more in something one day. We’ll see. I’m generally happy working across a few things, and don’t mind a bit of context switching if I can see the bigger picture of what I’m working on.