Be A Generalist

<p>If you look at any of the great Stoics, you’ll notice that philosophy was just one of their many diverse interests. <a href='https://dailystoic.com/seneca/'>Seneca</a> was a philosopher and a playwright and a political advisor. <a href='https://dailystoic.com/marcus-aurelius/'>Marcus Aurelius</a> was dabbling in philosophy...as he had the most important job on the planet. <a href='https://dailystoic.com/cato/'>Cato</a> was a senator who led the opposition to Julius Caesar. <a href='https://dailystoic.com/cleanthes/'>Cleanthes</a> was a boxer and a water-carrier. And <a href='https://dailystoic.com/zeno/'>Zeno</a>, the founding teacher of the philosophy, began his career as a successful merchant voyager. </p><p>The stereotype of the philosopher is one who spends all day and night with their dense textbooks and their denser thoughts. When the truth is that the great philosophers we hold up as having made these brilliant insights into human nature and the human experience were reading and studying philosophy in addition to many other endeavors and activities. They, David Epstein would say, had “range,” they were “generalists.” In his new book <a href='https://geni.us/JpsgCfT'><em>Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World</em></a>, Epstein put to bed the myth that going all in on a particular field is the key to lasting success. <a href='https://dailystoic.com/david-epstein-interview/'>As he told us in our interview for DailyStoic.com</a>:</p><p>We miss out on wisdom if we’re too narrow...Specialists become so narrow that they actually start developing worse judgment about the world as they accumulate knowledge...Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer is your ability to take knowledge and skills and apply them to a problem or situation you have not seen before. And your ability to do that is predicted by the variety of situations you’ve faced...As you get more variety, you’re forced to form these broader conceptual models (in the classroom setting called “making connections” knowled