As a valued subscriber of this newsletter, you might consider yourself a generalist. I certainly consider myself one. I’m proud of it - proud to be an integrator, a connector, someone that does a lot of things decently and sees patterns where others see none.
So when I stumbled upon an article titled “Generalist Disease” last week, I was curious. Disease, huh? Did I just find my antagonist?
In a nutshell, the article argues:
- After university, many bright graduates join prestigious management consulting firms.
- Working there for a few years optimizes for optionality and prestige, not depth. It feels like success: your parents love it, and you make a ton of money.
- Ultimately though, generalism isn’t the goal. Even people who stay in consulting eventually become specialists - just in consulting.
- "The first 10 years of your career are for learning what you want to do. The next 10 are for getting great at it. The next 10 are for making an impact and making money.”
- As a remedy, you need to recognize that (a) moving into a more specialized role will involve a downgrade in title and pay, and (b) that hard work will be necessary to learn the craft from the ground up.
To my surprise, I agree with a lot of these things. I just wouldn’t call it “Generalist Disease”. I would call it “working-in-profession-that-adds-zero-value-to-society-disease”.
Let's dive in.
Work Hard & Take Responsibility
One of the things that pisses me off the most is that our best and brightest graduates from business schools go into management consulting, investment banking, or private equity.
All of these professions are exclusively aimed at making people who are already filthy rich even richer. (Which explains why they pay so well, and I understand that’s attractive.)
Is that going to make the world a better place in the future? I don’t think so.
I believe that entrepreneurship is the future.
I believe that the best and brightest minds in our society should become entrepreneurs, or work with entrepreneurs. On the ground, not as advisors.
When I speak to 20-something year-olds who tell me “I’d rather do more strategic work”, I think: “motherf***er, you can’t do strategic work when you don’t understand the business.”
And to understand the business means getting your hands dirty: talking to customers, processing tickets, selling the product. It’s fair to do “strategic work” later on in your career, but you won’t get there unless you get your hands dirty.
As Dan Hockenmaier puts it in his article:
“Of course there is nothing wrong with choosing a field like product management or VC. I know many people for whom these jobs are the source of maximum impact and happiness. But the best product managers I know don’t float above the team acting like the CEO of the product. They spend an incredible amount of time talking with customers to understand what they need, and with the team figuring out how to help them move faster. And the best VCs I know are out personally pounding the pavement every day to find the best founders to work with.”
Doing the grunt work also teaches you accountability: you take actions, and you face their consequences.
Conversely, when you consult, you suggest actions, and may never see how they turned out.
This does two things:
- It stifles your feedback loop, because you don’t learn what works.
- It doesn’t allow you to take responsibility: at the end of the day, if a suggestion you make doesn’t work, it’s still someone else’s problem.
Working in a startup is the polar opposite to that: you do a lot of hard, basic work - and you see what works and what doesn’t. And at the end of the day, as the founder, when you can’t make payroll … well, that’s on you. There’s no one else to blame.
Longer Sampling Period = Better Job Satisfaction
Now, I don’t believe consulting is all bad: it allows you to sample a lot of things quickly. And people with longer sampling period are much happier in their job later on. So starting out a career in consulting isn’t a bad idea; staying in consulting is (for most people).
As much as I hate on management consulting, I almost became one myself. After university, I applied to all the big consultancies. Luckily, most of them rejected me - having strong opinions that run counter to the clients’ isn’t a good trait for consultants, as it seems.
Instead, an opportunity to co-found a startup came along, and I couldn’t be happier with that choice.
Get in the Arena
So, what do you do if you’re a bright graduate and want to do something with a little purpose?
You become an early member in a startup tackling an important problem.
For example, as a Founder’s Associate: the right hand to the (commercial) founder that helps them with a lot of their operational work. It’s a hard job, often with long hours, but you’ll get an overview of the entire business while doing a lot of grunt work.
You don’t live in the Ivory Tower; you are in the arena (the best place to be). And after a year or two, you’ll be presented with an opportunity to specialize a bit more - after sampling a variety of tasks.
Generalists don’t remain jacks-of-all-trades forever. At some point, you develop T-Shaped expertise where you go deep on a few domains after having built a solid foundation.
But that doesn’t mean you have to specialize in one domain only; you can still pursue a variety of domains and be an integrator among them. That’s what high-level managers and founders do. Eventually, your T-shaped expertise will become a pi-shaped expertise.
Generalism isn’t a disease.
It’s a blessing.
The world needs people who recognize patterns, who integrate knowledge, who solve problems thanks to their range.
I just don’t think that IB, PE, and consulting are the right places to do that.
Action Items
- Take responsibility somewhere. Being accountable is a great way to grow.
- Identify what other professions you'd like to try. Make a plan to sample them.
- Put yourself into the arena instead of the stands. See what happens.
One question for you:
Who do you know (maybe even yourself) who’s early in their career and considers themselves a generalist?
I would love to interview them for my next venture. No strings attached.
A quick add-on to the last newsletter
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the lessons I learned from taking my sabbatical. As luck would have it, during the same time, my former idol Tim Ferriss also took a sabbatical. Where he took most of the time to write a book. In a recent podcast with Kevin Rose, Kevin notes “that’s not a sabbatical”, to which Tim replies [edited for clarity, emphasis mine]:
“The word sabbatical is typically used in academic circles. And when they take a break from teaching, they do other things. And I think you and I, if we’re being honest, are both working dogs. We can take breaks, but it’s like you take some type of working dog, like a border collie, you stick it in your apartment in New York City and it doesn’t run, and you’re like, why is it chewing the couch? It’s because it has to run. And so for me to do the deep work of books, specifically, is just a different shift, different gear than feeling the pressure of putting out a podcast once or twice a week.”
Maybe this is a better explanation of why I just couldn’t sit still. Maybe it’s good to plan for this in a sabbatical. If you love your work, then it’s hard to not do it. So in a way, that was a good sign - having the urge to get back to work.
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That’s it. Thanks for reading. If you liked this, please share it with one friend. If you didn’t, please let me know so I can improve this newsletter.
With ❤️ from Dominik.
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