Symbolic collage by author with Midjourney & Megapixls
Sometimes You Need a Generalist
This Is True for Content Creators and Everyone Else
Why do smart people often fail to find the best solutions when working on a problem?
It’s because of their limited understanding of the problem. And this results from limited points of view, mindset, or perspective. Even smart and knowledgeable people have these limitations.
The generalist brings a wider point of view to any discussion. For example, with most online writing, what you usually find is a statement of the facts, some description, and a standard explanation of how to deal with the problem. Read a few different articles on the same topic and you’ll see what I mean.
But offering a new angle that reveals a different perspective can interest more readers and provide a better light on the subject. Most experts on creative work say that creativity is a matter of connecting the dots. Finding new and useful connections that others don’t see.
This saves time, money, and opportunity costs.
And connecting the dots works better if you have more dots. Someone who is too specialized, has a hard time broadening or even changing the standard point of view. That limited scope reduces the opportunities for a fresh approach that is more effective in solving client problems.
In science, business, or any field, different people working under different circumstances follow different paths. They don’t always arrive at the same destination. And there’s noting surprising about that.
Typically people in one silo aren’t even aware of divergent results of those in another field. That’s where the generalist is useful. He is more likely to bridge the gap.
Limitations of Specialists
This was true even in the university. Professors in one discipline would often be ignorant of results obtained when solving similar problems in other areas. There is so much to cover, no one can keep up with everything in his own field let alone results in other areas.
At University of Chicago when I was a student, I noticed some interdisciplinary departments like Ideas & Methods and the Committee on Social Thought. These departments didn’t have their own faculty, unlike the other departments. For a certain course or seminar, they would borrow a professor from physics, one from mathematics, one from biology, etc.
Many knowledge workers now think of themselves as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. Having these kinds of thinkers on the team is needed when solving intractably hard problems, not to mention the so-called “wicked problems.” Many businesses and research tanks now follow this approach.
The goal is to overcome widespread work biases that retard progress and limit opportunities. These conditions often go unnoticed by the people they afflict.
Few people realize the kind of results you get is path-dependent. Your starting point and the choices you make along the way determine where you end up. No one approaches a problem independent of her history, personal beliefs, or early choices.
A person can try to be more open by incorporating alternate viewpoints. Teams can include team members who got there by following different paths.
My Experience with Having a Broader Background
When I was an advertising copywriter I often noticed the problems many of my clients faced had already been solved by businesses in another field. Advertising approaches that had been used successfully for 10 years or more in one product or service category were not even tried in another. And that’s because they were unknown to those people.
When I was lucky enough to have worked in that other category of advertisers, I just picked up what I learned then and provided it to my new client.
When I used these methods in their field, clients were impressed that I was able to come up with such great outcomes. They would have been less impressed had they known they were old-school to other businessmen.
I’ve seen similar results across the board. Many mathematicians since the beginning of the last century used a certain method to stimulate creativity. Once I discovered it, I would use it frequently. It worked so well I was able to come up with creative solutions to difficult problems, solutions that amazed me.
The method, described in detail by mathematician Henri Poincaré, was to work hard on a problem for a few days. Then set it aside and work on something else, maybe something pleasant and non-challenging.
Then like magic, the solution to the problem occurs to you all at once in finished form. It usually happens in the morning while showering or shaving and not thinking.
My biggest breakthrough occurred in topology while parallel parking my car! I was able to write out the short, elegant, highly creative proof like it was being dictated to me by someone much smarter than I am.
It’s as if the intense conscious work continues unconsciously once you set it aside. But there’s no free lunch. The intense conscious work in the beginning is required.
Then when I got into advertising copywriting and started to read all the books on the subject, I found some copywriters also discovered that method of creative problem solving-60 years later!
Becoming a Generalist–Against My Wishes
In my schooling from Kindergarten to grad school, my least favorite teacher was Miss Fitzpatrick, my ninth grade English teacher.
One day while I was eating lunch with my friends, I noticed she was monitoring the lunch room.
Then she came over to torment me. “Mr. Manning,” she said, “You think you’re so smart because of all you know about Einstein and mathematics. But if you don’t learn other things too, you won’t be well rounded.”
“Good,” I shot back as the perfect 13-year-old wiseass, “Because well-rounded people aren’t sharp.”
Looks like the old girl had her revenge. Somehow I ended up more well rounded than anyone I know—despite my earlier contempt for generalists.
There were two factors that might explain how it happened. By spending lots of time studying really difficult subject matter, I became a highly skilled learner.
The method works and I recommend it to anyone aspiring to be a good learner. Think of it as weightlifting for your brain.
The other factor that pushed me into generalized learning is an insatiable curiosity and a passion to connect the new learning with my previous learning. Don’t know how I got that.
It wasn’t a choice, it just happened. And was well established by college.
Then there’s research and the opportunities new tools offer. For example, I can download a dozen weighty research papers and load them into NotebookLM.
In minutes I’ll get summaries of each source document, and summaries and analyses of the collection as a whole. And answers to specific questions I ask with references given to the specific source where the answer came from.
So much for AI hallucinations. The RAG model lets me choose the sources that will be used, and the cited references lets me check the inferences made from those sources.
This capability will turn future researchers into supermen. And it’s doing it to me right now, thanks to my background which has prepped me for it.
I can now go through a mountain of material at a dizzying speed.
At the beginning of my writing and advertising career, I needed to research the market, the customers, and the competition.
So I would go to a research firm, pay a retainer for them to do the research and then for each page of printed output they would messenger to me. It would bring me up to speed quickly, so I could ask the right questions when meeting with clients and supplement the research needed to do their work.
It would make it easier to move into a new product or service category where I lacked the experience upfront.
How I Became a Creative Generalist
I started as a technical copywriter and then moved to advertising, B2B and B2C.
While working in advertising, my work eventually included copywriting and directing the image creation, both still and moving images, illustration and graphic design. Especially after I moved into photography about 38 years ago, the actual techniques of image making became a major emphasis.
So in addition to the diversity of subject matter, I acquired a fluency with diverse tools of expression.
First it was printing and publishing techniques as I created and produced many hundreds of collateral pieces, like self-mailers and corporate brochures.
We did a lot of radio advertising for some clients, mostly in the auto aftermarket sector. So I learned radio commercial scripting and production.
Spot TV was next. At the high point, I would write, cast, direct, and edit (not shoot) about six spots a month. For a chain of cell phone dealers, I would produce each commercial, one or two a month, three ways. One was for the general cell phone market. Another version was directed to the Afro-American market segment. And a third was done in Spanish for the Hispanic market. The campaigns were wildly successful.
When I wanted a super exciting website for my firm, I studied Flash and Action Script to produce outstanding Flash sites for my firm and for some clients. They were 100% Flash animated sites. The fees for these sites were expensive, which motivated me to get good at them.
I continued to do that until Flash was murdered almost overnight by big tech for being vulnerable to security threats. Then I moved to html and finally WordPress sites.
When I write an article I am willing and able to do the images and layout and don’t usually require a separate art director.
Why do smart people often fail to find the best solutions when working on a problem?
It’s because of their limited understanding of the problem. And this results from limited points of view, mindset, or perspective. Even smart and knowledgeable people have these limitations.
The generalist brings a wider point of view to any discussion. For example, with most online writing, what you usually find is a statement of the facts, some description, and a standard explanation of how to deal with the problem. Read a few different articles on the same topic and you’ll see what I mean.
But offering a new angle that reveals a different perspective can interest more readers and provide a better light on the subject. Most experts on creative work say that creativity is a matter of connecting the dots. Finding new and useful connections that others don’t see.
This saves time, money, and opportunity costs.
And connecting the dots works better if you have more dots. Someone who is too specialized, has a hard time broadening or even changing the standard point of view. That limited scope reduces the opportunities for a fresh approach that is more effective in solving client problems.
In science, business, or any field, different people working under different circumstances follow different paths. They don’t always arrive at the same destination. And there’s noting surprising about that.
Typically people in one silo aren’t even aware of divergent results of those in another field. That’s where the generalist is useful. He is more likely to bridge the gap.
Limitations of Specialists
This was true even in the university. Professors in one discipline would often be ignorant of results obtained when solving similar problems in other areas. There is so much to cover, no one can keep up with everything in his own field let alone results in other areas.
At University of Chicago when I was a student, I noticed some interdisciplinary departments like Ideas & Methods and the Committee on Social Thought. These departments didn’t have their own faculty, unlike the other departments. For a certain course or seminar, they would borrow a professor from physics, one from mathematics, one from biology, etc.
Many knowledge workers now think of themselves as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. Having these kinds of thinkers on the team is needed when solving intractably hard problems, not to mention the so-called “wicked problems.” Many businesses and research tanks now follow this approach.
The goal is to overcome widespread work biases that retard progress and limit opportunities. These conditions often go unnoticed by the people they afflict.
Few people realize the kind of results you get is path-dependent. Your starting point and the choices you make along the way determine where you end up. No one approaches a problem independent of her history, personal beliefs, or early choices.
A person can try to be more open by incorporating alternate viewpoints. Teams can include team members who got there by following different paths.
My Experience with Having a Broader Background
When I was an advertising copywriter I often noticed the problems many of my clients faced had already been solved by businesses in another field. Advertising approaches that had been used successfully for 10 years or more in one product or service category were not even tried in another. And that’s because they were unknown to those people.
When I was lucky enough to have worked in that other category of advertisers, I just picked up what I learned then and provided it to my new client.
When I used these methods in their field, clients were impressed that I was able to come up with such great outcomes. They would have been less impressed had they known they were old-school to other businessmen.
I’ve seen similar results across the board. Many mathematicians since the beginning of the last century used a certain method to stimulate creativity. Once I discovered it, I would use it frequently. It worked so well I was able to come up with creative solutions to difficult problems, solutions that amazed me.
The method, described in detail by mathematician Henri Poincaré, was to work hard on a problem for a few days. Then set it aside and work on something else, maybe something pleasant and non-challenging.
Then like magic, the solution to the problem occurs to you all at once in finished form. It usually happens in the morning while showering or shaving and not thinking.
My biggest breakthrough occurred in topology while parallel parking my car! I was able to write out the short, elegant, highly creative proof like it was being dictated to me by someone much smarter than I am.
It’s as if the intense conscious work continues unconsciously once you set it aside. But there’s no free lunch. The intense conscious work in the beginning is required.
Then when I got into advertising copywriting and started to read all the books on the subject, I found some copywriters also discovered that method of creative problem solving-60 years later!
Becoming a Generalist–Against My Wishes
In my schooling from Kindergarten to grad school, my least favorite teacher was Miss Fitzpatrick, my ninth grade English teacher.
One day while I was eating lunch with my friends, I noticed she was monitoring the lunch room.
Then she came over to torment me. “Mr. Manning,” she said, “You think you’re so smart because of all you know about Einstein and mathematics. But if you don’t learn other things too, you won’t be well rounded.”
“Good,” I shot back as the perfect 13-year-old wiseass, “Because well-rounded people aren’t sharp.”
Looks like the old girl had her revenge. Somehow I ended up more well rounded than anyone I know—despite my earlier contempt for generalists.
There were two factors that might explain how it happened. By spending lots of time studying really difficult subject matter, I became a highly skilled learner.
The method works and I recommend it to anyone aspiring to be a good learner. Think of it as weightlifting for your brain.
The other factor that pushed me into generalized learning is an insatiable curiosity and a passion to connect the new learning with my previous learning. Don’t know how I got that.
It wasn’t a choice, it just happened. And was well established by college.
Then there’s research and the opportunities new tools offer. For example, I can download a dozen weighty research papers and load them into NotebookLM.
In minutes I’ll get summaries of each source document, and summaries and analyses of the collection as a whole. And answers to specific questions I ask with references given to the specific source where the answer came from.
So much for AI hallucinations. The RAG model lets me choose the sources that will be used, and the cited references lets me check the inferences made from those sources.
This capability will turn future researchers into supermen. And it’s doing it to me right now, thanks to my background which has prepped me for it.
I can now go through a mountain of material at a dizzying speed.
At the beginning of my writing and advertising career, I needed to research the market, the customers, and the competition.
So I would go to a research firm, pay a retainer for them to do the research and then for each page of printed output they would messenger to me. It would bring me up to speed quickly, so I could ask the right questions when meeting with clients and supplement the research needed to do their work.
It would make it easier to move into a new product or service category where I lacked the experience upfront.
How I Became a Creative Generalist
I started as a technical copywriter and then moved to advertising, B2B and B2C.
While working in advertising, my work eventually included copywriting and directing the image creation, both still and moving images, illustration and graphic design. Especially after I moved into photography about 38 years ago, the actual techniques of image making became a major emphasis.
So in addition to the diversity of subject matter, I acquired a fluency with diverse tools of expression.
First it was printing and publishing techniques as I created and produced many hundreds of collateral pieces, like self-mailers and corporate brochures.
We did a lot of radio advertising for some clients, mostly in the auto aftermarket sector. So I learned radio commercial scripting and production.
Spot TV was next. At the high point, I would write, cast, direct, and edit (not shoot) about six spots a month. For a chain of cell phone dealers, I would produce each commercial, one or two a month, three ways. One was for the general cell phone market. Another version was directed to the Afro-American market segment. And a third was done in Spanish for the Hispanic market. The campaigns were wildly successful.
When I wanted a super exciting website for my firm, I studied Flash and Action Script to produce outstanding Flash sites for my firm and for some clients. They were 100% Flash animated sites. The fees for these sites were expensive, which motivated me to get good at them.
I continued to do that until Flash was murdered almost overnight by big tech for being vulnerable to security threats. Then I moved to html and finally WordPress sites.
When I write an article I am willing and able to do the images and layout and don’t usually require a separate art director.