Why Being a Generalist Is a Strength, Not a Weakness

In My Mind #24

This week: generalists vs specialists, first principles thinking, and what my first half marathon taught me about self-criticism.

First Principles vs Analogous Thinking

Most of our lives we make decisions using analogous thinking. This is where we take current understanding and apply it to new situations based on the way that we've seen things happen in the past. So we effectively make decisions by following what most others do, and that's how we decide to move forward in our own lives.

First principles thinking is where you take everything back right to basics of what it is in order to get to the absolute truth, whether that is similar to the way that things have been done before or completely different.

In everyday life, analogous thinking is far more common. This is because it's a lot quicker and it's a lot more efficient. It works most of the time and it's socially safe because you're taking what most people would do and how things have been done in the past and using that to make a decision in a slightly different domain.

First principles thinking is often a lot slower because you have to go through every single stage of reasoning to get to the truth. It can make people feel negative about how you've decided to go about something. If it's completely different to the norm, they might not understand it and they might question you.

The problem with analogous thinking is it's quite easy to fall into the trap of if you don't question it. You can end up taking on someone else's assumptions and someone else's behaviour without thinking about it and without realising you just do things because that's the way you've seen them done. If you were to take a decision based on first principles, you would ask yourself: "Is this true or is this just how it's done by other people?" That's why it takes time to analyse the answer and work out exactly what is the truth so that you can make the right decision going forwards. I'm not saying that first principles thinking needs to be applied every single day, but occasionally test yourself, stop yourself mid-thought, mid-action, check whether what you are doing is because you've decided to do it or because it's just what the norm is.

Running my first half marathon

At the weekend I ran my first ever half marathon at the London Landmarks Half Marathon. And I went into it having completed a training block working towards a 6:10 per kilometre pace, which would put me at the finish at around 2 hours and 10 minutes. We woke up on the Sunday morning and I felt good. I felt ready to go. We made our way down to the start. I'd hydrated throughout the week and fuelled myself well enough and then the race started and I couldn't keep my heart rate under control. The plan was for the first 5-10km to keep my heart rate in zone two and then progressively increase the pace until towards the end I was giving it all I could to get over the finish line. But within the first 5km my heart rate had already jumped into zone three and it was starting to get out of control. The heat, the atmosphere and everything else got the better of me on the day and I had to try and settle back down to a comfortable situation before I ended up going so far that I wouldn't be able to finish the race. Unfortunately, my heart rate didn't drop and as we got to 12km my partner Chloe sped off in front of me, leaving me in the dust. From there it was all down to me. I struggled through aches, pains and cramping and ended up walking a few sections which I really didn't want to do going into race day. But I understood that in the moment it's what my body needed and had I not I might have caused myself more problems that might have stopped me from getting over the finish line at all.

I finished the race with a time of 2 hours, 19 minutes, and 34 seconds. Had you told me before the race that was going to be my time, I probably wouldn't have been that pleased. Although if you told me before I started training that was my finishing time, I would have been very pleased.

It took a little while for me to understand that on the day that was my best effort and on the day I probably wouldn't have been able to do much more. I had some very negative self-talk while I was on the course. Every time I had to walk, I had a voice in my brain telling me I'd failed despite all the people around me shouting my name and cheering me on towards the finish line.

Later that evening, after I was able to decompress and actually take a review of the race, I realised that this was my first half marathon. The people whose time I'm comparing myself to have completed several half marathons in the past. Maybe 2 hours 19 minutes was the best I was ever going to achieve on that day. And just maybe I'd pushed myself harder than I thought I would because there are certain sections of that race I don't remember even now. My eyes glazed over and I was just there to put one foot in front of the other, getting myself to that finish line.

All of this to say that we are our harshest critics. We put ourselves forward for challenges that are supposed to push us outside of our comfort zones and yet once we get there we criticise ourselves for not being as comfortable there as we are with other things. Be kinder to yourself today as you take on a new challenge.

Being okay with being a generalist

For most of my life I've heard people talk about the need to have a specific set of skills. Whether it's to say that you need to become an expert in something, whether it's to do with personal branding and saying you should have a niche, or whether it's the general cultural attitude of being a "jack-of-all-trades but a master of none" and that being used as a negative towards people who haven't specialised in one specific area. But that's not how my brain works.

People who know me know that I take on interests for 3-4 months at a time. I will go incredibly heavy into those interests, consuming my entire life. And then within a couple of weeks drop the whole thing as if it never existed in the first place. I've had this many times in my life. When I was younger I had it with Warhammer miniature figures. In my adult life I've had it with sports like handball, cricket, football, snooker. In terms of hobbies I've had rock climbing, coding, making YouTube videos, photography, all things that I've done incredibly intensely for a few weeks or a few months and then dropped. I always thought it was a negative of mine that I was never able to see anything through to the finish and I always gave up too early. Recently though I've been thinking that actually this might be one of my strengths. I'm very adaptable, I'm able to pick things up quite quickly, get to a reasonably proficient level and then drop them and pick up something else and get the ball rolling once again.

What's more interesting is how each of these things play into each other. There are some things that are quite obviously linked like photography and YouTube videos. Both are using cameras, both about how to set up a camera in the correct composition so that your subject is in frame, everything is in focus and it looks visually appealing.

But some things don't always show as being linked straight away. For example writing this newsletter actually links to a lot of my sporting endeavours. See, in sports you quite often have training sessions that you don't immediately see the benefit of but over time those training sessions make you better. And that's how I see writing this newsletter. If you go back and read my first newsletter, you will probably think it is absolute rubbish. You might even think that this particular edition is rubbish. But the way that I see it is each one of these newsletters is a training session and by completing the training session, even if I don't see the immediate benefit in terms of viewership or followers, time after time I'm making improvements, and getting better.

Working in live events and with computers has meant that I'm able to look at a network of computers or pieces of equipment used on a festival stage and understand how they all communicate with each other. Perhaps someone with just one of those interests wouldn't understand as much. By being more of a generalist and taking more interest in more topics, I'm able to draw the lines between different industries, between different interests and really start to see patterns emerging in my life. Something I could never do if I was only interested in one or two things.

If you're someone with multiple interests, don't listen to all those people that tell you you should choose one thing and just go for it. If that's what you want to do then do it. But there is a way of living which means that you can explore all of your interests at once, even if it means that some get forgotten for weeks at a time and then you pick them up later on. Before my holiday in February I hadn't picked my camera up for almost six months but in the six months before that there wouldn't go two or three days without me having it in my hand taking photos of something.

So while I talk about consistency being better than intensity (as I've written about here), if you have lots of interests you can't always find the time for them all at the same time. So having an interest in one or two at a time and going into them incredibly deeply might be the way for you.