The Case for Generalism

People keep telling me to pick a lane. I've been hearing it for over a decade now.

I studied jazz guitar in college, then built a software company and sold it, then worked as a product engineering leader on the growth team at Patreon, then spent five years traveling the world studying folk music traditions with local musicians. Now I run a music conservatory, a podcast, AI engineering intensives, and a series of weekend retreats where one weekend might cover general contracting and the next one covers jhana meditation.

I understand why this looks scattered. It took me a long time to see the thread myself.

How generalism actually works

The standard advice is to go deep on one thing. And honestly, it's good advice. The specialists I've worked with throughout my career have built incredible things precisely because of their depth. I followed that path myself for years with guitar. I practiced eight hours a day and got serious about it.

But the interesting stuff started happening when I left the practice room.

Studying flamenco in Spain taught me things about rhythm that jazz school never touched. Building PodClear taught me software engineering by necessity, which gave me the technical foundation to build everything that came after. Working at Patreon showed me how creators actually make a living, which shaped everything about how I built Sonora.

Each thing I did made every other thing better. The returns were compounding in a direction that specialization couldn't access.

The transfer rate is the asset

Here's what I've noticed. The stuff that transfers between domains is usually the stuff that matters most.

How to learn quickly in unfamiliar territory. How to spot patterns across systems. How to build something from zero when there's no playbook. How to teach a complex skill to someone who's never done it before. How to read a room. How to ship.

These skills don't live inside a single domain. They live between domains. And the only way to develop them is to actually move between domains. You can't learn to be a fast learner by studying the same subject for twenty years.

The knowledge stack

I think about my experience as a stack, where each layer makes the layers above it more powerful.

Music gave me discipline, ear training, and the ability to practice something for thousands of hours without external validation. Software engineering gave me technical fluency and the ability to build whatever I could imagine. Startups gave me the ability to ship under pressure and sell a vision. Ethnomusicology gave me cultural literacy and the ability to learn from people who think nothing like me. Education gave me frameworks for breaking complex skills into teachable pieces. AI gave me leverage.

None of these would be as useful alone. Together they create options that wouldn't exist otherwise.

For example: I can sit with a master musician in Brazil and learn from them, then come home and design a curriculum around what I learned, then build the software to deliver it. No single skill in that chain is exceptional. The combination is what makes it work.

Why now

I think generalism is becoming more valuable, and fast.

AI is compressing the time it takes to get functional in a new domain. The cost of context-switching is dropping. The people who can move fluidly across fields, who can see connections that specialists miss, who can integrate ideas from unrelated disciplines, are going to have an enormous edge.

The world has been rewarding specialists for a long time. That made sense when execution was expensive and information was scarce. Now execution is getting cheaper and information is everywhere. The scarce resource is synthesis. The ability to look at five different fields and see one opportunity.

The tradeoffs are real

I want to be honest about what you give up.

You will never be the best in the world at any single thing. You will spend years feeling like you're behind the people who started earlier in each field. You will have to explain yourself constantly. Your resume will confuse recruiters. Your LinkedIn will look like a fever dream.

And there are moments where depth wins. If you need brain surgery, you want a specialist. If you're competing for a chair in a symphony orchestra, breadth won't help.

But if you're trying to build something new, something that connects ideas from different worlds, something that requires you to learn fast and adapt faster, generalism is a superpower. The people I admire most are all generalists. They just don't advertise it because the culture doesn't have a good word for what they do.

What I wish someone had told me

A few things that would have saved me years of second-guessing:

Go deep enough to be dangerous. You don't need to be world-class in every field. You need to be good enough to have real conversations with the people who are. In music, I went deep. In engineering, I went deep. In everything else, I went deep enough to build real things and earn the trust of the experts around me.

Let each domain teach you something the others can't. If you're picking up a new skill and it feels exactly like the last thing you learned, you're probably not stretching far enough. The value comes from genuine difference.

Keep building. Generalism without output is just dabbling. Every domain I've entered, I've shipped something. A company, a product, a curriculum, a body of work. The projects are what make the breadth real.

Trust the compound interest. The connections between your skills will take years to become visible. You'll feel behind for a long time. Then one day you'll be in a room and notice something that nobody else noticed, because nobody else in the room has your particular combination of experience. That moment makes all the wandering worth it.