"And yet, here I am. Fifty years old, irredeemably a bookseller, and more happy than if I’d…if I’d what? Well, than if I’d just about anything, I suppose. I’ll put it this way – if I were to win the lottery tomorrow, the only thing that would change would be the quality of my inventory. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. Even in those moments of blankest regret, when all the bills come due at once and my stock looks like it could have been chosen at random by a blind, crack-addicted three-year-old; when the office hasn’t been cleaned in a month and the coffee jitters set in because I forgot to eat my breakfast which is still sitting cold on the kitchen counter six hours later; when the phone rings and it’s some flea-market guy asking to “pick my brain” about a “real old book” he found buried in cowshit in his granddaddy’s barn; even when I get home after a house buy and realize that every book I just overpaid for smells irretrievably of cat piss…even then, I can only imagine one way forward: more books. And then, more books after that and, for dessert, more books. More books. More books. More books."

I find myself feeling strangely uncomfortable when people call me a generalist and imagine that to be a compliment.  My standard response is that I am actually an extremely narrow, hidebound specialist. I just look like a generalist because my path happens to cross many boundaries that are meaningful to others, but not to me.

I loved this: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Robert A. Heinlein

"Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears."

'…But Arum doesn’t place the blame only on the grads. Based on his research with Josipa Roksa, he concludes that American institutions of higher education are not rigorous enough and have “abandoned responsibility for shaping and developing the attitudes and dispositions necessary for adult success.”

Just what are those attitudes and abilities? Character traits are seen as the most important factors, according the Pew study we’ve reported on this week. For example, 6 of 10 Americans say “a good work ethic” is extremely important. Teamwork and getting along with others is also important, cited by 57%. A college education itself was cited by fewer than half (42%) as a determinant of success.'

"With all these interests, how do you keep from just being a dilettante?
It’s not about being a generalist. I like to go deep in a lot of things, but when I do, I like to go deep enough to contribute. If I like scuba, I become an instructor. If I like music, I become a disc jockey. If I like movies, I want to work on a movie set. I don’t become a world class academic in that field, but I get good enough to understand the nuances. And then, because I have experience in so many fields, it gives me a pattern that other people don’t have. For me, being unique and having friends who are unique is a really important thing."

"You’ll be told it’s because it makes communicating your vision easier, and that’s true.  But there are two more important reasons.  First, if you know how to be a sound man, you know how to make the sound man’s job easier. This has the potential to make you very popular with sound men (or editors, or cinematographers, etc), something you’ll need when your only currency is good will.  Second, when you begin producing your own work, this renaissance approach to filmmaking will allow you to start before anyone else signs on.  Knowing you can finish in a pinch, if you have to, will lend you a confident relentlessness that makes others want to get involved."

"The specialist sacrifices resilience during times of change for earning potential in the short run. It also bears pointing out that the short run benefits to specialization are only significant when selection pressures amplify the specialist’s competitive advantage. Otherwise, being 5% better than second best only provides 5% more benefits.

If this point isn’t immediately obvious, consider an analogy to the strict zero-sum competition in sports contests. In an Olympic race, being 1% faster than your competitors could easily be the difference between first and last.  Outside of that zero-sum competitive environment, the practical value of being 1% faster than the next guy is negligible."

n this field is that most of us try to be jacks of all trades within UX. We try to be, and at times are successful at being, the IA and the IxD and the Content Strategist and the Visual Designer. Now you may be thinking, ‘duh Lis, that is how this field works’. But I would argue that this is an issue, a big issue, for several reasons. 

'There was one talent Donald Hogan did possess which the majority of people didn't: the gift of making right guesses. Some mechanism at the back of his mind seemed ceaselessly to be shifting around factors from the surrounding world, hunting for patterns in them, and when such a pattern arose a silent bell would ring inside his skull. Factors: Washington, the absence of the Dean, the offer of a salary competitive with what he could hope to earn in industry, but for studying, not for working ... There were people, extremely top people, whom specialists tended to refer to disparagingly as dilettanti but who dignified themselves with the title "synthesist", and who spent their entire working lives doing nothing but making cross-references from one enclosed corner of research to another.'

'Specialisation is hard on polymaths. Every moment devoted to one area is a moment less to give over to something else. For a polymath, the charge of dabbling never lies far below the surface. Part of my regret at the scarcity of polymaths is sentimental. Polymaths were the product of a particular time, when great learning was a mark of distinction and few people had money and leisure. Their moment has passed, like great houses or the horse-drawn carriage. The world may well be a better place for the specialisation that has come along instead. The pity is that progress has to come at a price. Civilisation has put up fences that people can no longer leap across; a certain type of mind is worth less. The choices modern life imposes are duller, more cramped. The question is whether their loss has affected the course of human thought. Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline.'

'While “self-styled” seems mostly a put-down, it is a notably weak one. The user of this phrase notes that someone claims something, but lacks an official credential, or strong consensus, supporting this claim. But we the reader can also note that this speaker offers no stronger criticism, and is not willing to directly contradict the offending claim. After all, instead of calling someone a “self-styled visionary,” you might say “he calls himself a visionary, but he’s not; he hasn’t has a vision in years.”'

"In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions…"

"Parsons The New School for Design announced a new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design set to launch in Fall 2010. The program is based in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, which encompasses innovative programs that apply design thinking to study the intersection of cities, services and ecosystems."

"That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions."

Reflecting on his discipline-busting career, Richard believes that designers need to adopt a wide-spectrum approach to the future, encouraging them to broaden their bandwidths. In a lightning tour covering Leviathan, lasagne and Dan Dare he argues that we now have a unique opportunity to reinvent our future and that designers need to start focusing on the real problems that matter