ON BEING A GENERALIST
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I recently re-joined the amazing Doing It For The Kids community - an online space I've frequented on and off for more years than I can remember. Prompted to re-introduce myself, I decided to pose a question, "What would you do if you're me and you've never been able to fully articulate what you do?". I explained the sort of people I work with, the value I bring to clients, how I have a strange career trajectory and that I always feel like I can't commit to one specialism. One person came back and said, "Well, you're a generalist - own it".
That, my friends, was quite a revelation. A generalist feels like a label to run away from, not to embrace.
Many of my favourite people - the brains I admire the most - are exceptional at a particular thing. The friend whose ear is so finely tuned that they can pick out and isolate where the guitar part in the mix of a track is slightly off (and fix it). The friend that when I ask him to explain to my tween daughter why Dior was so important to fashion in the last century, takes a book from the shelf, looks her in the eye and says "Are you ready?".
I get very interested in things - I like to dive into a subject very deeply - but not in a way that I care to sustain that interest at the exclusion of everything else. It all gets folded into and related to everything else. I understand quite a bit about probably quite a lot of things.
Generalist World describes a generalist as "an expert learner, problem solver and big picture thinker who can effectively apply these strengths across varied fields and roles. They are skilled at spotting relevant patterns in complexity and are often empathetic and future-focused." When I read this, I thought - yes, that sounds like me. Mostly, anyway.
The skill I'm yet to master is how on earth you explain - and sell - this generalism. I'm still learning on this front. Often people tell me that they just want to work with me because they think I can help them. I think perhaps my broad experience reflects back the breadth of their need "I need help with this, and this - oh, and this".
I've started to experiment with the term 'generalist', using it on my website as a way to describe myself. I have to say that it still makes me wince slightly. It still feels a little shameful, like I'm a person waiting to find their thing, and to proudly announce what that thing is.