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The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
  1. We are in a second renaissance where the creator economy is growing exponentially and people are turning to creators to learn skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing digital environment.
  2. Specialists who focus on a single interest or skill are at a disadvantage compared to generalists who are diverse and interesting.
  3. The internet favors generalists because social media exposes creators to diverse audiences who are there to be entertained, not just to learn or buy.
  4. Failure stacking, or pursuing goals and gaining experience even through failures, makes generalists irreplaceable by allowing them to acquire a diverse set of skills.
  5. The most profitable niche for a creator is their unique combination of opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and life experience packaged into impactful content.
  6. To earn a living as a generalist, one must become an entrepreneur and build a general audience around helping them achieve a big goal.
  7. Creators should experiment with writing about all their interests and let the audience decide what resonates, framing everything through the lens of the big goal.
  8. To make interests compelling to others, creators must illustrate the "why" and importance of ideas, as people weren't born with interests but persuaded into them.
  9. Creators should establish authority in topics that resonate by creating digital assets like free products to avoid repeating themselves and give room to experiment with new ideas.
  10. Generalists should build a portfolio of income sources by launching free and paid products around their best ideas every 3-6 months until they have a satisfying brand and business.
·thedankoe.com·
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
how to write better openings and introductions / intros in non-fiction writing
The beginning is almost never the most compelling or important part. It's just the bit you thought of first, based on your subjective chronology.
Signposting what you're going to write about is good, but starting with an exhaustive list of definitions is extremely boring.
Invoking paleolithic people is an overplayed way to convince us your topic is cosmically important.
Openings need tension – paradoxes, unanswered questions, and unresolved action
Good openings propose problems, pose questions, drop you into an unfinished story, or point at fundamental tensions within a topic. Ideally within the first paragraph or two.
"Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the questions of..."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity."A Sense of StyleStephen Pinker
Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.
Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one
Your interest in the topic is your best directional clue for finding the tension or interesting paradox. Your urge to write about the thing hopefully comes from a place of curiosity. You have unanswered questions about it. It feels important or consequential for unexplained reasons. You think you've seen things in it other people haven't. Pay attention to that interest.
Problems are a destabilising condition that has a cost for a community of readers that needs a solution. Destabilising condition is just a fancy word for “change” here – a change in the status quo. Put another way, a problem is an expected turn of events, that has undesireable consequences, for an audience who will care about it, that we want to explore solutions to.
Williams is speaking to a community of academic writers in his book. They're trying to present scientific and research problems in plain, objective language, which isn't necessarily what we want to do with narrative writing like blogging or personal essays. We have a little more liberty to put interesting padding around the change, consequences, and solution, such as telling an opening anecdote, or drawing readers in with characters, rich details, and sensory descriptions.
Williams suggests we try to state our problem and then ask a series of so what?'s to get at the underlying problem
For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone
When McPhee writes, after first immersing himself in his raw material (field notes, interview transcripts, official documents) for weeks, he then draws a structure for the work. The structure lays out the major themes and scenes he'll work through, in the order that will make them most compelling and coherent.
Developing a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.
·maggieappleton.com·
On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
Build Personal Moats
Build Personal Moats
If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.
Scott Adams popularized the idea of finding the intersection of 2-3 things you’re best at even if you’re not best at any of them individually. He wasn’t neither the best cartoonist nor the best writer nor the best entrepreneur, but he was the best combination. It could be a combination of expertise, relationships, sensibilities, and skills that you’ve accumulated over the years. If you’re just starting out, ideally it picks up where your childhood left off. Now, I spent my childhood trying to make the NBA. So if like me, you misallocated your childhood in the skills department, you have to be more creative. Later on, I realized I could apply the self-discipline and systems thinking I deployed when trying to be good at basketball into other fields, and found some that better fit my natural abilities.
If you’re a generalist, you want to be the best at the intersection of a few different skills, even if it’s a few disparate things. The challenge is it's easy to lie to yourself & say that you're a generalist when in reality you've tried a bunch of things and you've flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else.
Some people who you think are generalists have also specialized. Malcolm Gladwell for example writes about lots of topics, but he's mastered the art of translating academic work for a mass audience. Tyler Cowen self-defines himself as specializing as a generalist, but he spent a couple decades going deep on economics.
·eriktorenberg.substack.com·
Build Personal Moats