Range is your advantage

On generalists and focus, more on frameworks, and doing more with less.

"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." —Steve Jobs

Sometimes the clearest path forward is a wider one, as long as you know what you’re building toward.

In this one:

• Range

• Structure

• Systems

Also, a quick reader poll at the end. Scroll down now if you’re curious.

STORY

A jack of all trades

“Jack of all trades, master of none…but oftentimes better than master of one.”

Somewhere along the way, the second part of the phrase got lost and with it, the nuance.

For much of life, I’ve gravitated toward multiple interests. I didn’t always have the words for it, but over time I began to recognize myself as a generalist. Not because I was aimless but because I was building a life, not just a career.

Where specialists dive deep, generalists move wide and connect. I never wanted to be boxed into one path, one role, or one version of success. I could see early on that different fields spoke to each other even if most people didn’t cross the lanes.

My time in investment banking exposed me to all kinds of businesses and industries. The patterns and the transferable principles fascinated me. I started looking for what connected the dots.

I realized I could apply lessons from one domain into another even if, at the surface, they seemed unrelated. While building a life in IB, I started a band. That experience taught me about product, teams, audience-building all of which fed into later startup work. The creative informed the commercial, and the commercial sharpened the creative.

And when I learned to code, what drew me in was that programming wasn’t about writing code but about solving problems.

A generalist mind is like a Swiss Army knife: not the most precise tool for any one task, but often the most versatile.

Generalists aren’t people who get bored easily and jump around. They’re often people who go deep enough in a subject to grasp its essence and then wonder what else it might connect to. They resist premature specialization because they’re deeply curious.

It’s easy to misunderstand the generalist path. It often looks messy, nonlinear, or uncommitted. But generalists are explorers. They thrive in ambiguity. They understand that the world rewards pattern recognition, not just technical depth.

They’re often the ones who ask the unexpected question. Or who combine insights from wildly different places to create something new. Many of the world’s most impactful thinkers, innovators, and entrepreneurs followed winding, interdisciplinary paths. They weren’t lost. They were collecting dots to connect later.

The truth is, you can be good at many things. And being good at many things may actually help you figure out what you’re best at.

Being a generalist doesn’t mean being shallow. It means being intentional about what you go deep on and knowing when to pull back and see the bigger picture. It means knowing that mastery isn’t always about precision. Sometimes it’s about perspective.

A notion I return to often is the idea of “investing for life” – the belief that your life is your longest and most important investment.

With that lens, my generalist path starts to look like a kind of portfolio strategy. Not scattered, but deliberately diversified.

I chose to plant a garden instead of a one-crop farm.

Specialization can yield great harvests. But gardens offer variety, resilience, and beauty if you’re patient and intentional.

Not every seed will grow at the same pace. But over time, if you nurture them, they create a life that’s rich, robust, and uniquely yours.

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

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EXPLAINER

Tools of the trade: Investing frameworks pt. 2

Frameworks are mental models or structured ways of thinking that bring focus and consistency to your decisions. They reduce uncertainty, speed up decision-making, and help you stay grounded when things get noisy.

Today, I’ll walk you through the three investing frameworks I mentioned in the last edition.

These are not formulas. They’re starting points. Treat them as such and adapt them to your particular circumstances.

1. Lifecycle Investing

The core idea:
Your investment strategy should evolve as your life does. In your early years, you can take bigger risks in search of growth. As you age, your priorities shift and your investments adjust with them.

Helps with:

• Aligning your portfolio with your actual needs and priorities

• Avoiding mismatches (e.g. being too conservative too early, or too aggressive too late)

• Giving yourself permission to change your approach over time

How to think about it:
Your life has seasons and each one comes with different financial demands and emotional bandwidth. Lifecycle investing reminds you that your portfolio doesn’t need to look the same forever. In fact, it shouldn’t.

Start by asking:

• What life stage am I in right now?

• What am I optimizing for? Growth, income, flexibility, safety?

Think of it as “age-adjusted investing,” but with room to include your personal context, not just your date of birth.

2. The Three-Bucket Strategy

The core idea:
Divide your money into three distinct “buckets” based on when you’ll need it.

• Bucket 1: Short-term (0–2 years)
  Cash, money market funds, savings for emergencies or immediate needs.

• Bucket 2: Medium-term (2–5 years)
  Balanced mix of safer assets and modest-growth opportunities for goals like buying property, starting a business, or changing careers.

• Bucket 3: Long-term (5+ years)
  Higher-growth assets like stocks, equity funds, or long-term bets.

Helps with:

• Separating short-term survival from long-term strategy

• Reducing the stress of “what if I need this money soon?”

• Staying invested without feeling overexposed

How to think about it:
This framework brings clarity by connecting money to timing. Instead of one big amorphous investment “pot,” you now have purpose-driven segments.

It also builds emotional resilience. If markets drop, your short-term needs are still covered while giving your long-term bucket time to recover and grow.

3. Core-Satellite Investing

The core idea:
Anchor your portfolio with a stable “core,” then use smaller “satellites” to explore high-conviction ideas.

• Core: Long-term, diversified holdings like index funds, government bonds, or blue-chip stocks.

• Satellites: Smaller positions in things like crypto, startups, thematic ETFs, or individual companies you believe in.

Helps with:

• Staying disciplined with most of your capital

• Making room for curiosity and opportunism

• Managing regret: You don’t have to bet the farm to place a meaningful bet

How to think about it:
Your core is what keeps you grounded. Your satellites are for testing the edges; exploring what excites you, what you believe in, or what might outperform.

It allows you to express your unique insights or interests without letting them derail your long-term progress.

Using Frameworks

You don’t need to follow any single framework dogmatically. But learning to think in frameworks and practicing the art of adapting them helps you move from passive investing to intentional investing.

You’ll start noticing where models overlap. You’ll learn when to switch gears or adjust the weight of one bucket over another. You’ll learn where your strengths lie and how to build on them.

Frameworks give structure to curiosity. They allow for exploration without confusion. And they scale with you. As your life evolves, so does your strategy.

You don’t need to master everything but you do need a point of view. Start there & iterate.

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.” —Charlie Munger

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NOTES

Doing the most

Range isn’t chaos, it’s a different kind of order. One that starts with curiosity but sharpens into a system.

Here are four things I’ve learned that help generalists actually do more, with less flailing:

1. Obsessive interest early on
Even with limited time, deep immersion at the start helps you move through a subject faster. It’s not about surface-level curiosity. It’s about intentional exploration — going deep enough to gather meaningful data, build traction, and make it stick.

2. Debate with yourself, without doubting yourself
The ability to hold multiple perspectives (especially when navigating people, teams, or creative work) allows you to resolve complexity faster. You see the moving parts early. That saves you time and missteps later.

3. Break things down to build them up
Generalists understand fundamentals. Not to memorize, but to synthesize. When you see how something really works, you can rebuild it in a way that fits your context.

4. Learn in systems, spot the patterns
This might be the generalist’s biggest advantage: a mind trained to look for reusable logic. Patterns. Transferable tools. Once you start seeing them, you never stop.

And that’s when it happens. You start making the unlikely connections that others don’t see. The very start of innovation.

Don’t pursue everything. But pursue with alignment.

If each effort ultimately feeds your one big goal – your personal interpretation of “a good life” – then every step, even in a different direction, can still be progress. —Are You Doing Enough?

Build enough understanding, fast enough, so that when it’s time to move, you’re not starting from scratch.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” —Shunryu Suzuki

So much to do…

You don’t always know what will sprout, or when.
But when you’ve put in the work, you’re ready to tend to what grows.
There’s a method to the madness.
In the words of Steve Jobs, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Have the best week possible.

AG

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👂🏽Quick one: I'm thinking about recording audio versions of this newsletter. Would that make your life easier?

Hit ❤️ if this edition sparked anything.
Got your own generalist story, made unlikely connections, or have thoughts on doing the most? Reply with a comment. I read every single one.