The Generalist's Renaissance: Why Your "Scattered" Resume is Actually Your Superpower
I've been staring at my resume for weeks, feeling like I'm trying to squeeze a symphony into a business card. Thirteen years of experience, yet every time I format it the "right way", with chronological progression, increasingly specific expertise, bullet points that say "I am a specialist!" I feel like I'm betraying my own story.
I'm bored of my own resume because it doesn't capture who I actually am or what I actually do.
The Generalist's Dilemma
Traditional career advice tells us to pick a lane and stay in it. Build deep expertise. Become the go-to person for one specific thing. But what happens when your expertise is seeing connections across lanes? When your talents are in translation, adaptation, and rapid learning?
I've spent my career as a founding team member across seemingly disparate projects, from Nando's malaria prevention work to Springfield WORKS' benefits cliff solutions, from scaling WAVE's vision for African potential to jumping in as employee #2 at African Leadership University. On paper, it looks scattered. In reality, it's been a journey to understanding my deeper “why”.
Research from Harvard Business Review shows that companies with generalist leaders are 15% more likely to achieve breakthrough innovations compared to those led by specialists. Why? Because generalists excel at pattern recognition across domains and can synthesize solutions from unexpected places.
The Hidden Thread
Every project I've touched has the same DNA: removing barriers that prevent people from achieving economic freedom. At Nando's, I tackled absenteeism and lost wages from illness through social impact bonds. At Springfield WORKS, I navigated multi-stakeholder collaborations to address the benefits cliff. At WAVE, I helped scale programs empowering young Africans to become what they imagine. At ALU, I saw that developing the next generation of African leaders would unlock economic freedom for hundreds of millions. And I also write fiction. I believe stories change how people see themselves, and mindset is often the most villainous constraint to access.
My career “pivots” are chapters in the same story, each one teaching me how to approach the next seemingly impossible vision with tools I didn't know I was collecting.
The AI Advantage
As Bonnie Murthy said, "AI is my era." Suddenly, my deep love of learning is a competitive advantage. My ability to ask good questions, my enjoyment of context prompting, the personality I bring that makes clients like and trust me, and my "high agency" approach to tackling impossible visions; these are the skills that matter now.
In the AI age, your ability to learn and adapt matters more than what you already know.
The New Resume Revolution
I'm done with the three-different-resumes approach. I want one resume that attracts people who understand that generalist skillsets are refined over time, valuable, and worth investing in. I want to work with teams who believe the world can be different and that they can make it so.
So I'm proudly adding the skills that make me excellent at any organization focused on expanding access to economic freedom:
Rapid learning and pattern recognition across domains
Multi-stakeholder collaboration and translation
High-agency problem-solving for "impossible" challenges
Storytelling that shifts mindsets and opens possibilities
A commitment to excellence.
Your Turn
We're at an inflection point where personality-driven consulting, good question-asking, and high agency are valuable. According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report, 50% of all employees will need reskilling. but the most in-demand skills are generalist skills: creativity, critical thinking, and complex problem-solving.
So let’s celebrate! We're free to build the entrepreneurial businesses we want with AI as our support team. We're free to pursue our particular WHY’s (once we articulate them clearly enough to attract the right people). And we're free to build the world we imagine.
Soon, being competitive will be less about articulating your specialties, and more about articulating your ability to learn and adapt.
And you can learn and adapt in many spaces. The one you're most likely to succeed in is the one you care most about.
For me, it's expanding access to economic freedom.
So rewrite your resume. Tell your real story. The one where all those seemingly random work experiences were actually preparing you for this moment, when you can finally state the bigger purpose underlying your work, the "soft" skills you've acquired, and when learning how to learn matters more than what you already know.
If you’ve read this far, and are curious, DM me if you’d like a copy of my restructured resume!
The generalist's renaissance has begun. Welcome to your era.
