[2/20] How Generalists Can Navigate Chaos

Learning to thinking clearly!

Hello and welcome to the Generalist’s Thinkbox!

I’m Elhadj, an entrepreneur/indie hacker and a generalist. I want to help you find your purpose by sharing practical and actionable content. Being a generalist can be overwhelming, but by connecting the dots, you can gain perspective, productivity, and opportunities.

I hope you learn something useful from every issue. Your feedback is welcome and valuable!

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For now, let's get on with today's program :

  • System Thinking For Generalists

  • Generalist' Digest

  • Relevant Content I Like

Let's get to it!

P.S: This is part of a series of 20 articles on being a generalist. We'll explore the means and tools to figure out our own path as a generalist. Each entry will focus on a specific topic, so if you have any preference just hit reply!

System Thinking For Generalists:

Generalists are used to chaos.

We are constantly pursuing many things at once, keeping track of a lot of details at any given time, following up on this or that item that our minds are always working. A whirlwind of activity that can definitely get overwhelming.

On top of this ‘inner context’, there’s also the external context: industry trends, new breakthroughs, macroeconomic events…etc. All these inputs together cause a combinatorial explosion in terms of moving pieces to figure out, which makes it basically impossible to get anything done.

We need a way to simplify our thinking. Now more than ever.

Clear thinking is the first step to making progress toward purpose. System thinking is a framework that helps us see the big picture and the connections between things. It helps us understand why they behave the way they do and avoid getting stuck in the details and missing the forest for the trees.

It’s especially useful for generalists because we need to deal with problems that cross multiple domains and disciplines and integrate knowledge from various sources and disciplines and adapt to changing situations and contexts.

System thinking comes with a specific language and a set of tools that we need to be familiar with to be able to fully leverage it.

One of the most interesting concepts is the ‘Iceberg model’. It’s a way to visualize situations by ‘depth’ or closeness to the truth. Think of it as a form of root-cause analysis:

From: The System Thinker website

The deeper we go, the closer we get to the actual reason behind the events and patterns.

This is the sort of mindset shift that can be included in system thinking. If you wanna learn more about this and more, read up on applicable examples as well as contemporary system thinkers and additional resources, please have a look at the article I wrote on HackerNoon!

Let me know what you thought!

Or if you're short on time: Tik Tok // YT Short

Generalist' Digest:

📜 Study: Our friend and fellow generalist Milly published a great study on generalists, their characteristics, and particularities based on answers by real generalists! We’ll cover it in a future issue in more detail!

🧠 Thinking: The secret has been out for a while now but, experts repeatedly get it wrong predicting things. Mostly because they often lack the cross-disciplinary approach that generalists are innately adopting.

🌟Interesting: Emily Wapnick is a well-known generalist and ‘multipotentialite’. She writes that generalists don’t need to always finish what they start if they get exactly what they came for! Very interesting take, countering the commonly held knowledge that we need to see everything through.

Content I Like :

Sometimes I'd recommend a cool piece of content/content creator!

If you’re into building digital products, I think it’s more important than ever to leverage some of the most convenient tools out there to build quick MVPs validate our ideas, and get traction.

The MVP no-code BootCamp helps do just that.

It’s a gentle intro into the world of no-code and equips you with the knowledge and experience required to build really cool products by yourself without needing any extra dev help.

I was part of a past cohort in the program and I definitely recommend the experience!

That's a wrap!

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