#ross simonini

Contradiction is the sign of a balanced life. To contradict is to reject a single set of facts or tenets. The vicissitudes of life demand that we change constantly and no method of thought will be able to address every change. It is essential to accept this uncertainty.

Epictetus said, “It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.” Another way of saying this is: what you pay attention to is reality. In every moment, where are you aiming your senses? Over the course of a year, what have you cumulatively given the most attention to? To which person or subject or task or issue do you offer the most valuable currency you have: time? For me, I hope the answer to this question is always an ever-expanding number of things.

As we ascend into higher education, we are required to narrow our interests until, at the end of our schooling, we might pursue a doctorate, for which we are expected to choose a focus so magnified that it’s unlikely to be of use beyond a small community of academics. Consider reading a book-sized work about phenolics and phenolic-polysaccharide linkages in Chinese water chestnut cell walls. But we focus for a good reason: Small ponds make fish feel big. We build our identity with limitations.

I was raised to believe that I was made to do one thing. Find that one pursuit that fills my life with meaning and empty all my energy into it. This is the realization of human potential: to excel with rigorous focus on a refined lifelong mission. This and only this will bring us to our greatest success and fulfillment. For me, this was not something I even had to be told—though I was, many times, by many people—because I implicitly understood that this kind of teleology was woven into the fibers of my world. I also knew that rejecting a singular pursuit would be an insult to my very existence. Without this unifying reason for being alive, I would wander aimlessly into the barren void of nihilism. I’d heard about great artists who refused to create, who stepped away from their work to fritter away their time on leisure, and I knew this was a life of tragedy.  Likewise, I understood that sliding your attention across interests is a way to waste your gift. The more hours you put into a skill, the more skilled you become—right? To treat your gift with the proper deference, you must exhaust yourself into it. Within this paradigm, the most unfortunate people are those who do not have a single, clear vocation. These types float from job to job without a trajectory; they are vagabonds who have given up on greatness. This may sound a little dramatic, but somewhere inside me, these beliefs are there—and as a lifelong generalist, I spend every day rubbing up against them.

To be specific: a generalist, as I’m defining one here, is a person who moves their attention fluidly across the spectrum of culture, rather than settling it into a fixed position. Usually, this means working, thinking, and acting in multiple fields of interest.  We have names for this person: the polymath, the Renaissance man, the universal human, the hyphenate, the interdisciplinarian. If we meet someone who does multiplex things, we need to use one of these words to denote this person’s unusual and unlikely behavior. They are an exception to the rule of specialism. If a generalist is successful, we regard them with alarm, unsure how someone arrives at such a life. If a generalist is unsuccessful, we might knowingly cluck at their foolish attempt to go against the grain. For these people, we use other terms, like dilettante or jack-of-all-trades—two descriptors that no generalist appreciates. That person is just another “jack-of-all-trades, master of none!” we say. But did we know that some scholars believe this line, written by Robert Greene about Shakespeare—a playwright, poet, actor—was also followed by the couplet “but oftentimes better than a master of one”? (I use “we” here because even I, as a generalist, am subject to prejudices against generalists.) We just plain dislike the notion that someone can be too many things. That would be unfair. You get one.

Let’s talk about mastery. Everyone wants to be a master, even if they are disgusted by the monstrous implications of the word. Mastery suggests dominance over something, but every true master knows that they are merely a supplicant at the mercy of their field, which existed long before them and will exist long after them. Anyone who believes in their own mastery likely suffers from hubris. Work hard enough at something and you watch your dominance slip ever further away.  Mastery is an illusion, a notion of a fictional purity that cannot be understood or measured in terms of time. Just look at those young savants who excel wildly after only a few years spent on their craft. For them, mastery cannot be the result of time plus work, as we all assume it is. In fact, maybe the newness of their skills is precisely what gives their work its value. But these little wonders are exceptions, right? The rest of us have to dedicate our lives to something to achieve greatness, and anyone who doesn’t do this will likely be middling in their work. Most writers I know are immediately suspicious when an actor publishes a novel. We delight in calling the person a moonlighter. Literature is our territory, and the only way to live here is to put in the time and labor.

After all, generalists are, in moments, great specialists. Likewise, a deep specialist can approach their niche from an ever-growing number of perspectives. A man with a repetitive job can endlessly engage with his work from fresh angles. And, of course, it’s all relative. A single task looked at from another angle is a plentiful cornucopia of individuated micro-tasks.  Some long-term generalists focus exclusively on a single activity for a number of years before moving on to the next. Rather than doing many things simultaneously, they do them sequentially.  Pure generalism and pure specialism are just intellectual games. Our minds drift between unified oneness and individuality without ever settling into either. Binary thinking is for computers.  These two states of being are not roles we need to inhabit but rather nodes to be considered. One situation requires diligent focus, but another benefits from a more diffuse form of attention. Certain qualities of engagement can occur only when you do multiple things at once. This is the value of the glance.