The words you are reading right now are not being typed. I’m sitting on my couch, on the remote island I live on with 191 others. The sun is setting, and I’m overlooking the mountains. There’s a dusting of snow on top. I live in the Scottish Highlands where sea eagles fly overhead, seals shout ‘hello’ when you jump into the freezing sea, and where it’s mandatory to wave at every person who drives past. It’s a place so small, you know your neighbours. A place so vast, you can find yourself walking for hours without seeing a single soul.
And yet it’s from here that I have created a world, an ecosystem, if you will. It’s called Generalist World. GW is a network of over a hundred thousand people around the world. It’s a space where we all figure out what’s coming next, together.
I’ve spent the past few years demonstrating online what it means to have a non-traditional, unique career. A career that only you can live. In that time, we’ve helped thousands of generalists meet others like them, see themselves in a new light, and find immense value in who they are.
I first realized this was a “thing” many years ago, when I left the startup I’d helped grow, and my boss said “there’s a Milly shaped hole being left behind.” Not a narrow, specialized-shaped hole. A squiggly, stretchy, zig-zag, one-of-a-kind-shaped-hole. For the past three years I’ve been obsessed with understanding models of how people work in ways that don’t fit societal norms, but do work for the people who ultimately have to live them.
I’m seeking to understand the different shapes of careers, and in which ways that shape helps someone live a life of meaning.
And for three years, I have been preaching to the whole world the value of the generalist. At first, this was received with some snickers and laughs, people thinking it was silly. We live in a specialised world, they said. But I had a hunch that things were changing. I could see this in my own life. And with the exponential growth of AI, I am more convinced than ever that in the future, the most successful, content, and free people will be the generalists. They simply have to be when we now all have 10,000 specialists with PhDs in our pocket.
With the gains of efficiency and productivity in AI, which just one or two years ago we honestly couldn’t have even imagined, it begs the question on everyone’s tongue: what next?
