Another one: Energy follows attention.

I think that’s why Generalists make good translators, nature’s cross-pollinators, if you will.

Lovely thread.

each area of study, to look into it and diagram it……would be the same structure…..

oh well, would have to do it in order for it to make sense here……..

then i would tie it into the ’energy cannot be created or destroyed’ theory…….all the same thing, same flow, same structure, just different language…….

occurred to me because i am surrounded by people from different modalities, yet i can follow all of them without knowing the specifics of what they know, and they let me, and encourage it, and talk specifics even though i don’t know shit about their field, then one day i realized why……the lingo is different, may not be able to follow all of the lingo and have to have it explained at different points, but the structure-it’s all the same…….

there is no way to understand all of that without it having a common structure…..

like laying down an overhead projector graph over all of it, would fit. i wanted to go back to school to prove that.

so, things are more alike than they are different. that’s what people miss in all of the lingo.

ok, this was the one thread in a million i could express that, done now, thanks ian.

First, genius and specialism vs. generalism are important distinctions, but the generalist is more than just distracted by “bright sparkly objects in other fields.” The generalist is the mortar who can help bind together discrete disciplines.

In my own field, one of the major restrictions on successful business management is an artificial cultural gap between business management and information technology operations. After decades of effort incorporating IT into business, management still doesn’t understand enough of IT to use it correctly, and IT doesn’t understand enough about business to facilitate it optimally. A business/IT generalist such as myself is needed to bridge the gap. And it’s an important gap – most businesses still handle IT as a cost center, when for many businesses IT has become an important profit center. If IT is the engine of your business, and yet your business and IT personnel don’t understand each other, you can see that this might result in non-optimal business outcomes.

So generalism is important, in many ways of which this is just one example.

Second, there are other dimensions against which to measure individual cognition, one of which is Myers-Briggs style personality indicators. Genius is going to manifest considerably differently between different personality types (whichever set of flavors you prefer in your evaluative methods). Just as understanding the characteristics of value between specialists and generalists is important, so is it important to understand how an ESTP might interact with an INFP in a creative collaboration. I’m not endorsing MBTI or any particular categorization type, I’m only saying that however you slice it the personality of the individual will shape their interactions with other personalities. So to extend it further, a specialist ESTP working with a generalist INFP might be expected to have a different degree of success than any other pairing of different personality types.

So if as a culture we are interested in encouraging genius, creativity, and productivity, then it would behoove us to better understand the roles and characteristics of the different ways in which these phenomena manifest and interact.

I think Mother Nature did a brilliant job of creating two complementary arrangements,
it’s almost like a tapestry — with Specialists forming the long threads and Generalists
forming the interwoven cross-threads.

As a Generalist, I can say that flow has meant following the threads across
several disciplines. One of the most important insights I have to offer from my experience
is that cross-threading has just meant recognizing overlapping constructs, i.e., what
is called x in one discipline is called y in another, and given somewhat different context.
I think that’s why Generalists make good translators, nature’s cross-pollinators, if you will.

As I have seen several of my specialist colleagues “drill down” and make discoveries, so too, have
my peers in cross-pollinating emerged with novel ideas, like a good Fusion cuisine.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that in the past, I have been given that gawd-awful diagnosis
of ADD, Not Otherwise Specified. I just wanted to tell my specialist practitioner that she
had taken the glass-half-full view of an otherwise perfectly normal, not to mention
integratively complex, Generalist. Shame our school curricula haven’t caught up with
the notion, much less the predominant models for what is considered legitimate careering.
In a different time (perhaps one to which we will cycle back around), Renaissance folks had
a readily recognized and welcomed place in a culture, much as the body of work by someone
like Joseph Campbell is recognized outright for the value that it holds. I saw a quote recently,
about modern times, that “the world needs more dilettantes.” I just find this so true on so
many levels. Ten years in one discipline is valuable, to be sure, just as the Generalist,
with 10 years of focused sampling (and what I call “conceptual roll-up”) has a unique
perspective as well.

It is my hope, as expressed by Adie @ 168, that we will find a way to honor both styles
and their respective opportunities for genius, as fueled by passion, innate ability and the
experience of flow.

Thanks again for your thoughtful, complexly integrated piece!
You are so right about the challenge of finding the right words ;)