The Generalist's Edge: Why Your "Scattered" Interests Are Your Greatest Asset

The Generalist's Edge: Why Your "Scattered" Interests Are Your Greatest Asset

Early in any creative career, the pressure is immediate: pick a lane.

We're told that Industrial Design — or any craft worth pursuing — demands singular devotion. That real professionals go deep, not wide. That focus is everything.

After a decade of working across physical products, digital systems, and strategy, I've come to a different conclusion:

The most valuable thing you can do is refuse to stay in one lane.

The Compound Effect of Curiosity

There's a persistent myth that generalists are "shallow" — a mile wide and an inch deep. But that framing misunderstands how knowledge actually works.

When you learn a new skill, you aren't just adding a line to your résumé. You're creating connections to everything you already know. Understanding both design and manufacturing doesn't give you two skills — it gives you a third: the ability to design for manufacturing. Add psychology to that, and now you can design for manufacturing and for the person using it.

This isn't additive. It's multiplicative. Every new discipline you absorb doesn't just sit next to the others — it reacts with them.

To be clear — depth matters. You can't connect dots you've never studied. But depth in one area has never required ignorance of everything else. The goal isn't to be shallow everywhere. It's to be dangerous in more than one place.

Seeing the Whole Puzzle

I've always thought of complex problems as massive puzzles.

Most professionals are trained to become experts at one section — the "blue sky" pieces, the "green grass" pieces. They get incredibly fast in their corner. And that matters.

But when you've spent time across multiple disciplines, something shifts. You stop seeing individual sections and start recognizing the edges of the whole picture. You notice that a constraint in manufacturing — a gap in the puzzle — can sometimes be solved not by a manufacturing fix, but by a shift in software architecture, or a change in the business model entirely. A piece from a completely different box.

Specialists find this disorienting. Generalists find it obvious. Not because they're smarter — but because they've been building the map for years.

Articulation: The Real Superpower

There's a concept I keep coming back to that I think is undervalued: articulating things into existence.

Having an idea is cheap. Everyone has ideas. The real skill is giving an idea the structure, logic, and clarity it needs to survive contact with the real world — to take something formless and make it specific enough that it can actually be built, funded, and shipped.

This is where generalists have an unfair advantage.

If your identity is tied to one discipline, you hand the idea off once your part is done. The designer hands it to the engineer. The engineer hands it to the business team. And at every handoff, fidelity is lost.

But if you can move across those boundaries — if you can think in form, in systems, in feasibility, in strategy — you don't hand the idea off. You carry it. You articulate it from abstraction all the way through to reality, filling whatever gaps the puzzle demands.

That isn't a lack of focus. That's a higher order of focus.

A Note to the "Scattered"

If you're early in your career and you feel like you have too many interests — if you're worried that your curiosity is a liability, that you should have "picked a thing" by now — let me offer a different frame:

Your breadth is not a bug. It's compounding interest that hasn't matured yet.

Every "random" thing you learn today — that detour into coding, that obsession with materials science, that side project in branding — is a future connection you can't predict yet. Five years from now, one of those "distractions" will be the exact thing that lets you solve a problem no specialist in the room can touch.

The world is full of people who are excellent in their corner. It is genuinely starving for people who can bridge the distance between them.

So stay curious. Keep going wide and deep. Keep connecting the dots.

The larger the puzzle gets, the more they'll need someone who can see how the whole picture fits together.