I’ve been publishing on the web for a long time (since 1993 if you must know) and in that time Ive made several attempts to move away from generalist content on my blogs to more specific, targeted content, particularly those things that were of interest to me as an interaction design/usability professional. Even though I am living the life of leisure (read that as gainfully unemployed) at present, I am still very interested in IxD and user-centered design. Yet there are a great many other things I am interested in as well, as you can tell by taking a look at my tag cloud. Ive found that trying to limit myself to such a narrow outlook did more to stifle my creative impulse than any amount of self-doubt ever did.
When I was in liberry skool, I remember coming across a quote that made the point that generalists make great librarians because generalists have to be interested in a great many different things, and must be able to see connections and draw parallels between seemingly unrelated materials.
Grace Llewellyn, a former school teacher and current unschooling advocate wrote a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and in it she states that a “glorious generalist” is a fine thing to be. According to Llewellyn a glorious generalist is distinguished by their ability to “see the world whole”.
Because he can see the world whole, the glorious generalist can communicate thoroughly with people of every profession, religion, or background. He can pick up any book or magazine and find in it a connection to his own interests. If he is an all-the-way-there glorious generalist, maybe he can do mystical/scientific things like read the meaning of the galaxies in a fistful of sand.
She goes on to say that the glorious generalist
…starts with faith that the universe has meaning. This faith comes in two varietieshe can trust that a God, or an otherwise entitled Ultimate Reality, exists and created all this or guided it into place. Or, he can trust himself and other humans enough to believe that he can make sense of it all, that even if there is no actual collaboration between the pattern of a spiders web and the lyrics to that Led Zeppelin song, he can still weave it together in his mind so that it has harmony and order, like a stained glass window in a French cathedral. Also, he trusts language. He believes that with language he can bridge almost any chasm between himself and another person.
I’ve been a glorious generalist for most of my blogging life and havent been able to find a name for it, nor a need for it. I’ve had quite a lot of time to think in the last month, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything inherently wrong or bad about thinking this way, about processing information this way. What is bad and wrong is to be bound by fears that Im not good enough, not focused enough in my writing and therefore I shouldnt write anything at all.
There can be beauty in chaos. Meaning can be teased out from the most unlikely places. My purpose is to make connections, and thats what Im going to do from this point forward.
