
What Separates a Generalist and a Dabbler? - lionhearted
http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=438
======
hvs
_I love thinking on paper. In this case, I’m not going to go back and edit
this entry so it looks like I had it all along. No, I’d rather show you my
thought process._

Actually, I'd rather read a well-thought out argument that has been edited
than trying to parse your thought process. I ended up stopping halfway
through.

~~~
lionhearted
> Actually, I'd rather read a well-thought out argument that has been edited
> than trying to parse your thought process. I ended up stopping halfway
> through.

Thanks for letting us know?

Seriously, the whole piece is 800 words. You didn't have time to read because
you'd prefer 50 words shaved off with tighter editing... well okay, I
understand if you're a busy guy that likes dense information.

But then you have time to post a snarky comment? You lost me there.

~~~
sfk
hvs did not say that he didn't have time to read it. Your writing style is
simply horrible and incoherent and any sane person would stop halfway through.

~~~
mediaman
That's unnecessarily harsh.

But I do agree that editing serves a purpose. There is a reason that good
writers' essays, such as PG's, for example, are so durable through time: they
have been finely honed, eliminating wasted words and poor analogies, to
communicate an idea so purely that it captures the mind.

Sebastian's writing isn't poor. It's just not finished. There's a gem of an
idea there, but it's still covered in the dirt and grime of poor syntax and
wordiness. And like a diamond that goes unnoticed because it hasn't been
polished, it will quickly be forgotten, under the massive heaps of poor syntax
and crude wordiness that society, and the Internet in particular, generates
every day.

He could find his ideas traveling farther if he polished his diamonds.

------
derefr
How I interpreted this: a dabbler focuses on several pursuits with each given
an orthogonal mindset, perhaps making inter-field connections, but only
incidentally and post-hoc; a generalist has one goal and learns the skills of
several fields in the pursuit of that goal, focusing on new fields _because_
of their connections to current work. Breadth-first vs. depth-first search,
basically.

~~~
_delirium
That assessment is itself often made post-hoc, though. The dabbler who hits on
an interesting connection by chance is often retroactively written into
history as a generalist who purposely scoured the world far and wide for that
knowledge to connect to their project (sometimes people even convince
_themselves_ that that's what they were doing all along).

Same with what makes one a "dilettante" versus "Renaissance man", I think:
it's more or less a retrospective judgment, and the main factor is how much
your output impresses people. The mediocre would-be Renaissance man is a
dilettante, and the dilettante who does impressive things is a Renaissance
man.

~~~
derefr
I agree, they're not that useful as descriptive categories for people who are
still alive and working. However, I think they're good as _prescriptive_
categorical goals/mindsets: if you want to be remembered as a generalist, then
you _should_ be striving to find connections outside the fields you're aware
of, and then pursuing those connections where they lead.

------
mquander
It seems like you just defined the words to suit you. Personally, I would use
"dabbler" to mean "a generalist who is no good."

~~~
lionhearted
> I don't really understand -- it seems like you just defined the words to
> suit you. Personally, I would use "dabbler" to mean "a generalist who is no
> good."

Okay. If a generalist turns out no good, then why does that happen? Skill?
Ability? Work ethic? Marketing? Their ethics and philosophy?

"Not shipping work before moving on" looks like the best explanation to me. If
you have an alternative take, I'm all ears. I'm not so sure on this one, and
would really like to hear alternative points of view.

~~~
mquander
I think it probably happens because they are average people with a lot of
interests. If you're a person splitting your time between ten distinct
pursuits, you probably won't be much good at them compared to a person of
similar ability splitting their time between two pursuits. To be good at most
of them takes an unusually smart or hard-working person, like da Vinci or (I
guess) Steve Jobs.

Who doesn't "ship", anyway? I'm a lousy writer, probably a "dabbler", although
I care deeply about writing. I don't publish my writing yet. But I still sit
around producing pages; I wouldn't even be a dabbler if I didn't! In my
opinion, the difference between me and a "generalist" is that my writing
sucks.

~~~
lionhearted
> I don't publish my writing yet. But I still sit around producing pages; I
> wouldn't even be a dabbler if I didn't! In my opinion, the difference
> between me and a "generalist" is that my writing sucks.

But how do you know your writing sucks? You're obviously a learned guy who has
a good command of language. If you published and shared your work with people,
are you sure it wouldn't be received better than you think? Or maybe you'd
improve in skill and ability from feedback and observation of your work out in
the wild?

I find any discipline where I have deadlines and have to either ship, or a
competition is coming up, or a talk must be given, or something where I have
to deliver/perform on some level... I find I tend to get at least modest
successes in those areas. The areas I haven't released work, I'm much less
skilled/accomplished. Maybe I'm getting the cause and effect backwards, but I
don't think it's entirely the case.

I know my writing changed (and I think, improved) a lot when I started writing
publicly than when I wrote privately. It's... it's incredibly different,
y'know? It sucks and it's hard and sometimes people say mean things about you,
but in the end the real downside is quite low, and the upside seems quite
high. And maybe your work is better than you give it credit for? Derek Sivers
just wrote a really brilliant piece called "Obvious to You. Amazing to Others"
[1] about how people systematically undervalue their own
knowledge/skills/ability. Something like that at work, maybe?

[1] <http://sivers.org/obvious>

~~~
mquander
Well, I agree with all your points -- people definitely improve at things
quickly by being under pressure to deliver, and by exposing themselves to
critical feedback. So perhaps the set of good people and the set of people who
ship converge until they are identical, anyway.

------
3pt14159
I've always looked at it this way: Dabblers are never _really_ dabblers. I,
for example, dabble in Rails, but I'm a real expert in math based marketing
and database stuff ("Market Intelligence", "Business Intelligence",
"Analytics"). When I play with Rails, everyone around me just assumes that all
I do is dabble, but I don't. I'm building up valuable knowledge that I can
apply at an opportune time during my expert level focus elsewhere. Knowing
that I can, say, split test with either JavaScript or server side rails code
_does_ impact my decisions and suggestions.

Generalists, on the other hand, have reached a beyond-novice level of skill in
multiple, seemingly disjointed skills, but they are able to pull it together
to create new things. These are the type of guys that invent injections of
ionic compounds into the blood stream to map out cancerous tumors. They have
enough points of knowledge to come up with an idea that a world class tumor
surgeon would never be able to suggest, even if they couldn't actually preform
as well as the surgeon.

------
sesqu
_If you look at a Jefferson, da Vinci, Jobs – they shipped. A lot._

I don't think that's quite true. Leonardo was known to miss deadlines and
abandon works; perhaps a better approach would be looking at how confident
they were of their ability to produce varied things.

~~~
eagleal
Also comparing Jobs to da Vinci and Jefferson, well personally I see them in
different levels (both on recognition and impact of their actions).

------
angstrom
I don't think you can be just one. The work I've done solving problems gives
me a generalist view, but I'm constantly dabbling; keeping my ear to the
ground as it were for some idea of what the options are.

To that end a generalist has tangible real world experience with a given
technology that may be applicable to multiple domains. A dabbler has a very
cursory overview of the specific tech and is perhaps aware of some of the
options and caveats that exist, but hasn't earned the bumps and bruises to be
considered comfortable with it.

~~~
JohnnyBrown
I think the idea is that being a dabbler first is necessary but not sufficient
to become a generalist

------
danielrm26
First off, great post. But I think we improve it by simplifying. The word
"ship" implies a certain type of formal software work, which I think is an
unnecessary constraint on the concept.

Output is the key. If you are creating something, you're doing it right. If
you "dabble" from here to there and never make anything...you're doing it
wrong.

Output. Creation. Fruit. Those are the distinctions that matter.

------
juddlyon
To me the difference is in intent: a generalist is doing whatever it takes, a
dabbler is playing around.

