Don't Kill Your Parts: How to Be a Master Generalist
Integrating interests isn't just a career strategy—it's how you build a life that's truly yours.
"For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it."
René Descartes
Here's how to integrate your seemingly unrelated interests to create a higher quality of life without trying to overhaul your entire existence.
I’m a generalist. I’ve also worked as a specialist at top tech companies and have built a successful agency around that specialty. All the chatter on the internet seems to be about how you must choose between one or the other.
I’m living proof that you can be a specialist at work and a generalist in life. It’s not just possible, it’s ideal.
This is called being a master generalist.
Master Generalist: A person with a broad base of knowledge and experience across multiple fields, combined with a high degree of skill and proficiency in ~1-3 areas.
Today I’ll share some key unlocks that have helped me to shift my focus from arriving as a specialist to thriving in a process built around my interests.
Foundations: You Are Greater Than the Sum of Your Parts
I have a vivid memory of sitting in a bathtub as a Sophomore in college with a fever of 102. I was agonizing over a spreadsheet with every major sorted by my subjective aptitude and career outcomes.
The semester was starting and I felt like I was on a deadline to find my identity. Choosing between diverse interests like literature, philosophy, business, and writing felt like choosing which child to save.
At that moment, I was missing crucial information.
This decision (it’s relevant that the etymology of the word decision is from the Latin to cut off, as in to cut off alternatives) felt impossible for two reasons:
Each interest was connected to a different part of myself.
I had framed the decision to myself as a permanent choice between those interests. One interest would prevail, the rest would be indefinitely cut off to make room for a focus.
Have you ever seen the movie Inside Out? It's based on real psychology. We all have different sides—or parts (Disclaimer: I'm not a licensed expert in this area, but I've found the idea is foundational to understanding what it means to be a generalist).
There aren’t good parts and bad parts. They’re just parts. They all need a seat at the table.
In fact, each part of yourself can "have its own attitudes, ideas, desires, and even hobbies or creative outlets". It follows that having many interests can be a sign that you're successfully integrating more of your personality. Generalists—those of us who have many interests and often master more than one—aren't chaotic and flighty. We're actually well-integrated and have more of our full selves on display.
In retrospect, the agony made sense. It wasn’t about interests at that moment. It was about which parts of myself would survive.
In that light, it makes sense that they would fight for their existence: I had internally framed the decision as a lifelong commitment to honor one part and snuff out the rest.
I could have also framed specialization as a collaboration between those parts to build a specialist skillset. In that moment, I didn’t have the tools to do that.
At its core, that’s what it means to be a master generalist. You don’t just pick a speciality, you harness the power of all of your different parts and their interests to help create a speciality with a broad base.
Realizing that many of us are actually wired to have varied interests completely rewrote my internal monologue.
I began looking for ways to compromise intentionally. To pull chairs up to the table in my mind. To find ways of integrating parts of myself through pursuing interests and self-directed learning.
But it was just the start. I had to learn (often the hard way) how to actually make a career and a life as a generalist.
Parts form a helpful backdrop for the rest of this article, where we’ll talk about:
Making a path from parts-anchored interests.
Walking the path by trying everything and doubling down using proportional time investment.
Steering gently by picking strategic constraints rather than setting huge long-term goals.
And managing your drive as a generalist by finding modes of operating that allow you to both fill your bucket and find states of flow.
I hope it helps you on your way.
The Path: Parts-Anchored Interests
"It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?"
Henry David Thoreau
Prioritizing your own interests doesn’t need to ladder up to promotions or career shifts to be valuable. It can easily be done without reorienting your whole life toward a new identity or career. In fact, it’s often best conducted as a leisure activity.
Having no pressure to monetize the things you love means you can explore without restraint.
Though it’s not strictly necessary, I recommend trying to connect interests to parts of yourself. I find it helps me to rotate my interests with more intention, to find new interests, and to more intentionally integrate parts of my mind.
If you want a full framework for identifying and understanding parts, I’d recommend Jay Earley’s book on the subject. Rather than try to recreate that resource here, I’ll just share what I’ve personally done.
I’ve learned that I have two dominant parts which I named:
The Analyst - the part that thinks about things from every angle. It wants to understand root causes, and to predict future outcomes. It wants to keep me safe and stable.
The Artist - the part that resents structure, craves open blocks on the schedule, wants to make things intuitively, and appreciates all kinds of aesthetic beauty.
I used to be unable to explain why I both wanted and resented structure. Why I wanted to create systems but didn't want to live within the systems I'd created. Why I wanted to walk through the MoMA but I also wanted to write code.
You may have a similar contradiction that exists in your mind. It may point to two parts of yourself.
As soon as I had clearly identified these two parts of myself, a lot of things began to make sense. 'Conflicting interests' suddenly seemed more like interests that resonated with different parts of myself for different reasons. 'Focusing on one thing for my whole career' suddenly began to look more like shutting out parts of myself than being industrious.
If you want to try picking parts, don’t overthink it. Just pick the two most obvious parts that seem to be in dialogue with each other in your head all day and give them names.
I try to understand what these parts want by writing dialogue between the parts. I ask them questions about themselves like you would a new friend. I ask them what they like, what they dislike, and why. I ask them what they want to do in life. I ask them to talk to each other.
The answers form a basis for self-exploration in leisure research and skill development.
Pursuing these interests will help you to integrate those parts of yourself.
Parts-Anchored Interests: Simply interests that you can connect to a specific part of your mind.
I'll call these interests that you can connect to a part of yourself 'parts-anchored interests'. It’s not a term found in the literature, it's just a term I've made up to reference this idea.
Walking the Path: Trying Everything
"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
we will speak our own minds."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Parts-anchored interests form the basis of an emergent curriculum for leisure research.
It's not top-down, it's bottom up. The syllabus emerges—not from an authoritative source—from our own interests. Don’t surrender that.
When we begin creating an emergent curriculum, we need a way of keeping it organized. A way that doesn’t require us to know everything about what we’ll study up front. We need room to explore.
I use intuition to choose what to research, but I use a simple system I call proportional time investment to choose what to stick with. I spend an hour to see if it's worth spending a day; spend a day to see if it's worth spending a week.
Proportional Time Investment: Spend an hour to see if it’s worth spending a day. Spend a day to see if it’s worth spending a week.
Note: I don’t think that dopamine-laced activities should be evaluated in the same way. These activities aren’t always bad, they just play by different rules than quieter interests.
I listen to myself each step of the way to confirm it's a path I want to keep traveling.
I ask myself whether what I’m learning can be applied analogically to my specialties.
I also try to notice whether I’m truly not drawn to something, or whether it’s just getting harder to progress. Difficulty increases with skill, so this is important to monitor.
If I’m researching, I push myself to take an action based on what I learned.
Proportional time investment allows me to lay the path, brick by brick. I then saunter along the path I’ve paved—all day, every day. That’s not something I choose to do, it just happens whether I like it or not.
Action is a critical part of this system. Creation is what separates things like research from reading or study. Research isn't just consumption—it involves some degree of synthesis into a (usually written) work. Synthesis is a form of creation, creation is a form of action.
I'm a big proponent of embodied learning—of finding ways to use what I learn as quickly as I possibly can.
Many of us know this intellectually. Few of us act accordingly.
Trying everything is how we distinguish between what we enjoy in practice and what we only enjoy in theory.
The sooner you act, the sooner you know whether you enjoy the action itself.
If you take a parts-anchored interest, learn about it earnestly, try what you learn yourself in some small way, and increase your commitment to ideas from the bottom up, it's almost impossible to go wrong.
You'll wind up somewhere you want to be because every step was a step you wanted to take.
The knowledge will stick because you've found ways to use it.
Steering Gently: Swapping Long-Term Goals for Constraints
“Goals restrict your happiness.”
James Clear
“The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.”
Hugh MacLeod
Long-term goals are risky. Especially when they involve changing something significant about yourself.
They're something like the opposite of the process I just described; long-term goals are usually rooted in assumptions rather than iterative, intuition-led action.
I used to agonize over long-term goals. I would spend days or weeks thinking about grandiose five year plans. I even achieved or exceeded most of these grandiose plans.
I learned the hard way that you can both make sacrifices on the journey and not enjoy the destination.
A goal is a strategy that says: 'Pick where you want to go and act accordingly.'
The action is chosen by the goal.
A constraint is a strategy that says: 'Pick how you want to act and see where it can take you.'
The action is chosen by you.
A goal shrinks the horizon onto a point. A constraint challenges you to turn a point into the horizon.
Constraints, as I'm using the term, have a lot in common with boundaries or principles. I use the term constraint intentionally, though, because I think it's helpful to think in terms of what you will not do.
Ideally, what you will not do should be in service of who you know yourself to be—in service of creating the conditions that you know have helped you to flourish.
Here are a few of the constraints that have defined how I work. All of these are hard-fought. They came from difficult life lessons I'll surely write about in future posts.
I only optimize what I'm actioning
I only write about ideas I've felt at least twice (once when I note it down, and again when I review it)
I only consume content with intention
I only allow myself to disagree with an idea when I feel I fully understand it
I only spend a day if I’ve first spent an hour and decided if I want to proceed
You can quickly see how even a few constraints provide structure.
The constraints, taken together, form an identity. ‘I’m the type of person who…’ is a powerful frame.
Immediately, categories of writing are unavailable to me because they aren't felt, and feeling new things becomes an implied avenue to expand my writing. Optimization is something I choose to earn through action because it comes naturally to me. Consumption isn't bad, it is a tool. Pursuit of understanding must precede opinion.
Parts provide your intuitive curriculum.
They also help you decide which types of constraints will work for you.
Proportional time investment paves the path as you walk.
Constraints help you steer the path as you build it.
Finally, in order to really consistently do all of this over a long period of time, you must find your mode of operating.
Maintain Your Drive: Find Your Modes
"Do not hurry; do not rest."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If a constraint describes how you will not operate, a mode of operating describes how you will.
Don't seek people's permission to operate in the way you want to operate.
Defining a mode of operating challenges you to think less about where you’ll be in five years and more about how you’ll operate at your desk today.
Mode of Operating: An intentionally sustainable rhythm of working that facilitates the constant pursuit of interests while respecting constraints.
It's not a routine, but a good mode of operating is fertile ground from which routine usually springs.
It’s a set of conditions that you’ve learned are necessary for entering a state of flow.
Creating a mode of operating will keep you from the feast-and-famine cycle many generalists find themselves in: finding an interest, researching it obsessively, doing nothing meaningful with it, and then moving onto the next thing.
I've been there. It's important to recognize that this isn't altogether bad. It's simply unharnessed potential.
Some simple examples might include:
Using the pomodoro technique (25 minutes on, 5 minutes off).
Setting focus blocks that align with your natural focus windows.
Limiting prioritization to selecting a single top priority and working on it until it’s done.
There are at least two very important categories of modes for you to define for yourself:
A Filling Mode. This is a mode of operating that is closely associated with being a generalist. What fills your bucket? Exploring new ideas, reading, walking, meditating, stream-of-consciousness writing, talking with inspiring people, reviewing notes from things you’ve read, and consuming inspiring art are some good places to start.
A Flowing Mode. This is a mode of operating that pushes you to integrate generalist knowledge with specialist skills. What allows you to drop into a flow state and create things? Under what conditions do you tend to produce your best work?
You may even have a different filling mode and flowing mode for each part of yourself.
Focusing on the mode ensures you’re always where you want to be. You stop trying to arrive.
When I’m in my mode of operating, I feel alive. I feel present and content. I feel peaceful.
Work can feel this way. It can feel peaceful. It can feel intentional.
I'm working the way I want to work every day. I'm focusing on my experience today, not just in retirement. I'm optimizing my experience for my current self, and allowing my future self to emerge naturally.
I'm a gardener, not an architect. I create the conditions and observe what arises, and I attach what I can to my specialties.
The rest of what I can’t attach to a specialty just makes me a better, more integrated, more well-rounded person.
Conclusion
In summary:
Identify your key parts that drive your diverse interests
Allow parts-anchored interests to inform your emergent curriculum
Try everything, and use proportional time investment to decide what sticks
Be intentional about selecting strategic constraints
Spend as much time as possible in your mode of operating to avoid burnout
Let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like me to expand upon in future articles.
This was great. I appreciate the authenticity of recognizing and honoring all of who you are. We are so often conditioned by family, friends, society, and quite honestly, ourselves to become experts in one area. We are not one dimensional, and yet, so often strive to function like that.
The honesty of honoring every aspect of oneself feels closer to Maslow’s self actualization than anything else.
Brilliant