In February I posted a blog about a podcast where the host talks to a guest (which is the writer of this book) about this book. Now I have read the book myself and I can now say a little more about how generalism works. I will go through the 5 fundamental principles of generalism so you can get a better idea of how it actually works.

  1. Skill Stacking > Specialization
    As you probably can already tell, a generalist believes that skill stacking is better than specializing in one thing and being bad at everything else. You don’t know exactly what skill stacking is? Let me explain the basics of it. Instead of being the best in one particular thing and not focusing on anything else, you should get great at a lot of things. One of the benefits is that you can have multiple ways to earn money. If one way fails, then you have another one. This way you will always have a stream of income. There is one catch though. You have to use skills that complement each other, so don’t just have a random assortment of skills, that have no relation to each other. Some skills will complement each other better than other skills.
  2. Short-Term Specialization
    I understand what I just said about not specializing and this specializing is not the same as the one I was talking about earlier. This specialization is only short-term as the name of the principle suggests, the previous one was for your entire life. The only way to get tremendously better at something is to practice it consistently. When you really want to get better something you have to focus on it for a while until you’ve reached the amount of skill you wanted to achieve. Don’t let everything else in the dust, though. Keep doing it to maintain it, but you want to focus your most of your attention on the thing you want to improve it. It is okay to get a little bit worse at the other things, while you’re doing short-term specialization.
  3. The Rule of 80 Percent
    This rule is that you only get 80 % good at something. If 100 % is the best in the world then 80 % is great. This is because the rate of return diminishes as you get better at something. After 80 % the rate of return is too small, so you shouldn’t continue. A generalist doesn’t continue after 80 %, instead, they start short-term specializing in the next thing they want to get good at.
  4. Integration > Isolation
    This principle is where you start with the end in mind. First, you have to think about what you want to achieve. Take that goal and practice only on the things that will help you achieve that goal, disregard everything else. You should practice the thing in the context of your goal if you can’t then you practice it in isolation. Take it out of context and then practice the thing alone. While doing this you have to keep in mind that this practice is to ultimately use this technique to reach your goal. So when you’ve practiced enough out of context, you can start practicing it in the context of the goal you’re trying to achieve.
  5. Repetition and Resistance
    When you want to get better at something you have to practice it a lot. This is quite obvious, and almost everybody knows this, but there is another thing that a lot of people don’t know. As get better at the thing you’re doing you also have to increase the difficulty of the practice. If the practice is too easy you’re not going to get better at it. Don’t make it too difficult either because otherwise, you will get demotivated because it’s too difficult. You want to aim for the middle.

These are of course only the fundamental principles of generalism and there are a lot of other things in the book besides these 5 principles. If you want to learn more about generalism I advise you to buy the book yourself: How to Be Better At Almost Everything