A few years I wrote an article titled "Be A Specialist in Your Work, and a Generalist in Your Leisure".
It's actually one of my favorite articles i've ever written, not because it was particularly well written, but simply because I still believe strongly in the point I was arguing for.
I still believe there's tremendous value in specializing in your work. Master your craft.
But that's not what I want to spend our time talking about today. Today I'm thinking about the other half of the argument: be a generalist in your leisure.
Having varied interests and regularly exposing yourself to new experiences gives you more skills and perspective to bring to the rest of your life. Show up curious and eager and ready to learn. But keep your interests varied.
My personal opinion is that as you progress in any discipline you learn more and your perspective broadens, but at some point as you become hyper fixated on one hobby, your perspective begins to narrow again and it actually becomes a law of diminishing returns. That's how you end up with the grumpy local, the unhealthily obsessed collector, and the pinhole perspective about life.
I stumbled across this quote in one of my notebooks and just kind of smiled at the sentiment:
"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
So, keep being a student of surfing, swell forecasts, and board design, but also dive, fish, shoot a bow, slow cook a roast, roast coffee, pick up a paintbrush, sew a patch on your jeans, and handwrite letters to your friends.
Stay curious about things you know nothing about.
Here's a little inspiration from longtime friend of the program, Alex Swanson, who got out for some general leisure for his birthday last weekend—exploring some of the Channel Islands with his brother Greg.
