The generalist's moment has arrived

I spent a lot of my 20s wondering if I was doing work wrong.

A lot of my friends picked a lane early. Engineering, medicine, law, finance. They went deep. They got credentials. Their path made sense on a resume.

Mine looked messier.

Engineering degree, then sales/product, then growth, then product management, then solo building. Every switch felt a little like starting over. Useful in the moment, but hard to explain as a coherent plan.

David Epstein's Range helped me see that path differently.

His argument is that early specialization works well in "kind" learning environments, where patterns repeat and feedback is fast. Chess, golf, classical music.

A lot of real life is not like that.

The rules are unclear. The feedback is slow. The patterns change while you are still trying to understand them. Epstein calls these "wicked" environments.

In those places, breadth can be a real advantage. You have more analogies to reach for. More patterns to compare. More chances to bring an idea from one domain into another.

That feels more relevant every year.

AI is making the execution layer cheaper: code, copy, analysis, research, design drafts. What still matters is deciding what to connect, what to ignore, and what problem is worth working on in the first place.

I look at my own path differently now. Engineering gave me systems thinking. Growth gave me a feel for what moves the needle. Product gave me sharper instincts about tradeoffs. Building gave me reality.

And all of them strengthened my ability to learn fast.

None of that replaced expertise. But it did give me more surfaces to test ideas against.

That is a useful place to be when the world keeps changing.

What "wrong turn" in your career actually gave you a perspective most people in your field don't have?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

Have a great week!

Graham

📚 Book Notes

Range - David Epstein

A friend recommended this after I said I felt behind because I hadn't specialized. It reframed a lot of career angst.

The idea I still think about is "lateral thinking with withered technology": taking tools from one field and applying them somewhere they are new.

The people who do this are often outsiders. They do not know all the unwritten rules, so they try things insiders might dismiss too quickly.

Being a beginner is not always a disadvantage. Sometimes it just means you have not learned which doors you are supposed to ignore.

📖 Article

What's Your Edge? Rethinking Expertise in the Age of AI - MIT Sloan Management Review

This is a useful companion to Range because it gets at the same question from the AI side. If answers get cheaper, the edge moves toward judgment: knowing which questions to ask, when an answer is incomplete, and when the situation needs context a tool does not have.

That seems like the practical version of being a generalist now. Not shallow knowledge of everything. Enough range to ask better questions and enough judgment to know when the answer is not enough.

From the Blog

📝 The Skills That Actually Matter in the Age of AI
Perishable skills decay. Non-perishable skills compound. AI makes that distinction more important, not less.

📝 AI-native pods are the startup advantage inside companies
Small AI-native teams need people who can move between product, design, engineering, customer context, and judgment. That is where range starts to look less like a fuzzy career story and more like an operating advantage.

🔗 Things I Found Interesting

The State of AI 2025 (Bessemer Venture Partners)
A useful map of where AI startups are actually forming durable categories. The part that stuck with me is how much is still uncertain. We're still very early in the age of AI.

Understanding the Kalman filter with a simple radar example
A signal-processing idea invented for messy real-world measurement problems, now used in GPS, robotics, finance, and plenty of other places.

Elevating Earth: Reviving and Advancing an Indigenous Building Material (ArchDaily)
Modern engineering applied to a very old building material.

People Are Vibe-Coding Their Own Productivity Games
A small example of the same broader shift: when tools get cheaper, people can build weird, personal software around their own context. That favours people who can combine taste, self-knowledge, and enough technical fluency to make the thing real.

📣 Quote

"I have never met a person who has too much range." - David Epstein