The Generalist Retirement

A little while back on a ride a cycling friend asked me “Is there any outdoor sport you don’t do?”  I had just mentioned to him how my ice climbing went this past winter, and my excitement for some upcoming kayak and bikepacking trips.

I’m currently teaching a friend to mountain bike, another how to rock climb, and have been doing some overnight backpacking trips with my neighbor to help with his continual quest to lose weight and get healthier. 

I’m also scuba certified and have dived all over the world, and I’ve climbed all 58 mountains in Colorado over 14,000 feet as well as 3 of the seven summits.

I snowboard and cross country ski, and do at least one kayak touring trip every year.  And of course I run a few times a week.

Ok, at the risk of sounding like a braggadocio douchebag I’ll stop there.  Am I actually great at any of these things?

Not really.  I’m a jack of all trades but master of none.  

 

Generalist

When it comes to outdoor adventure sports I’m a generalist, plain and simple.  The definition of a generalist is “a person competent in several different fields or activities.”  Competent, I like that.  I feel I’m competent in all of the things I listed, to various levels of course.

If I had to choose one that I think I excel the most at it would be cycling.  Besides that I’m competent enough at the other sports and activities to keep up with much better athletes and to stay safe.  But I’m almost always with folks who are specialists at a particular sport and better than me.

Early humans had to be pretty good at everything, our survival depended on it.  But as our species progressed and formed larger settlements specialists started to form.  Farmers, craftsmen, and metal workers became crucial cogs in the wheel of society. 

Specialists soon became absolutely necessary for large societies to function. 

But generalists fill a crucial niche.  Generalists take knowledge and ideas and consider their utility in a broader way, often finding synergies that specialists would never see.  They tend to have more fluid intelligence, versus crystallized intelligence.

Generalists don’t have the problem of “because I have a hammer I see all problems as nails”. 

Take this example from the fs.com blog:

Philip Tetlock performed an 18-year study to look at the quality of expert predictions. Could people who are considered specialists in a particular area forecast the future with greater accuracy than a generalist? Tetlock tracked 284 experts from a range of disciplines, recording the outcomes of 28,000 predictions.

The results were stark: predictions coming from generalist thinkers were more accurate. Experts who stuck to their specialized areas and ignored interdisciplinary knowledge faired worse. The specialists tended to be more confident in their erroneous predictions than the generalists. The specialists made definite assertions — which we know from probability theory to be a bad idea. It seems that generalists have an edge when it comes to Bayesian updating, recognizing probability distributions, and long-termism.

 

Range

Breadth and depth help me in my outdoor sports.  They’ll never help me be the best at one sport.  For instance to be a really top cyclist you have to start to morph your body into a certain composition with very low bodyfat and very little upper body strength. 

Doing that will increase your speed on the bike, but you’ll look like an alien and have weak bones because cycling doesn’t ever load them.  I have no interest in looking like an alien who can’t lift a small bag of groceries.

As an amateur athlete, I have what David Epstein would call range.  If you’re not familiar Epstein’s #1 New York Times bestselling book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (<–affiliate link) is a great deep dive into the advantages of being a generalist. 

While specialists become famous – especially in the world of athletics – generalists often have longer and more dynamic careers.  As the famous science fiction writer Robert Heinlein said:

“Specialization is for insects.  A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.” 

Successful generalists realize it’s better to be really good at a bunch of different skills than the absolute best at one.  And when you combine the skills you’re really good at there’s bound to be magic in the overlap.

In my main career (aka my W2 jobs) I found this concept to be extremely advantageous.

 

I’m A Generalist, Sign Me Up For It

I moved up extremely fast in my career because I acquired a broad skillset over time.  I was really good at my main discipline which is geographic information systems.  But I also learned to code, not elegantly but good enough to write a program or two.    

I honed my writing and speaking skills.  Heck I took a teaching job just to get over a crippling stutter and to learn to be comfortable public speaking. 

My broad liberal arts degree help me immensely in my career.  I was often able to translate between the techy coder specialists and the tech-ignorant executives who made the big decisions.  That was a rare skill, and it benefitted me tremendously. 

As the brilliant mathematician Freeman Dyson wrote:

Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds.

I started as a frog but became a bird.  As my career progressed I always took advantage of training classes.  This skill broadening trajectory prepared me well for my entrepreneurial endeavors in semi-retirement. 

My graphic arts and blogging demand competence in sales, design, numerous software packages, marketing, and technology.  In general the growing freelance economy demands a very broad range of skills and self-sufficiency that’s not often sought after in corporate job postings.  

Are we prepared for it?

 

A Generalist Retirement

Curiosity is a superpower.  Those who fear boredom in retirement or who cannot find stimulating activities to do puzzle me.  I could live 20 lifetimes and not run out of things I want to do or try. 

Being a curious person makes the thought of full retirement that much more appetizing.  The possibilities seem limitless and I can’t wait to be surprised at the new muses and hobbies I will latch on to. 

Curiosity leads to growth and discovery.  It makes you a more interesting person.  Take Brian May, the legendary guitarist from the rock band Queen. 

After driving the sound behind one of the biggest bands in the world and headlining stadium tours for decades, he decided he wanted something else in life.  So he went and finished his PhD in astrophysics.  Friggin astrophysics! 

Now that’s an interesting dude. 

 

A Mile Wide And An Inch Deep

The phrase “a mile wide and an inch deep” is often used as a pejorative or insult.  I’m starting to call bullshit on that take.

In a world where specialty skills quickly turn to vapor due to rapid technology advances – or are replaced by computers entirely – I think being a mile wide is pretty damn valuable. 

Being a generalist, having fluid intelligence, having a wide range, or just being plain ‘ole curious – call it what you will but that’s where I’ve been pretty content to operate my life in both my professional and athletic endeavors. 

It provides variety, excitement, stimulation, and that feeling that we all had as kids at not knowing what’s around the next corner. 

And I’m really looking forward to a generalist retirement.