Picture standing in the Olympics stadium as your nation’s only representative competing in all the sports. Furthermore, it was you who enrolled yourself into all of them.

This is where many generalists find themselves at one point or another, if they are lucky. It’s where I found myself in high school when the academically rigorous IB diploma programme and my competitive karate career both started expecting 100% of my time, energy and effort, all the while I was already struggling to balance sleep and relationships with making music and chasing my entrepreneurial aspirations.

If one is not careful, however, they may fail to step into the stadium entirely due to analysis paralysis. An endless array of divergent interests is a gift in that you could easily fill a hundred lifetimes with them, and a curse in that you often feel compelled to do so. How, then, not to get stuck in the local minimum?

In the spring of 2022, the year I graduated from high school, university applications were nearing uncomfortably fast and I had yet to decide what to study. This was an important decision too, as unlike with the choice between high schools, this would directly influence my career opportunities.

I wanted to do, experience and achieve everything from deep tech breakthroughs on every field and building unicorns in every industry to competing in extreme sports, making music and writing. My original plan had been to hopefully create some headway in at least one of these already during high school, so that I could skip uni altogether, but that had not happened due to me not having focused enough on any one of them.

Having heard so many dropout founder stories, I thought that I didn’t need university anymore. However, when the time for applications came and I hadn’t gotten anything going yet, apart from good grades and some school projects I could genuinely be proud of thanks to my perfectionism having been hijacked by the school system, I figured I shouldn’t fight the current, but rather be very strategic about my positioning within it. And so it turns out that I had severely underestimated its potential.

For me, software seemed the most powerful and versatile of modern tools and skillsets, and I had observed that many, if not most, of the latest scientific advances often occurred in the intersection between data science and other fields, whether that’s biology, neuroscience or economics. I was also vaguely interested in machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence, which were easy to see as the next great wave in software, even without having predicted ChatGPT, which was launched later the same year that I started my studies.

Thus, I chose to study Data Science at Aalto University for it could give me a demonstrable, concrete and very broadly applicable skillset in programming, mathematics, machine learning, AI, software design and systems architecture, that would quickly make me generally useful for most types of projects, while still not forcing me to choose a specific domain. Nowadays, while vibe coding has brought down the cost of code itself, this skillset is still a great basis for building nearly anything in the realm of software - now only with agentic superpowers - and thus I wouldn’t choose differently even if I were to start again right now. Language agnosticism was definitely the right intuition for me to follow though.

While a very trendy degree at the heart of the current hype cycle is certainly handy in many ways, it is only the start, as selecting the right courses and extracurricular activities is the real art. Here I must admit that I also got very lucky. I had applied to study abroad too, but the information about admittance came so much later that I had already started at Aalto, which I picked mostly for the degree and the location.

Coming to Aalto was one of the best decisions I ever made. I wouldn’t know it until having made friends from various universities abroad, but apparently such extensive academic freedom and project-based learning is quite rare globally. Furthermore, the central mass of the Finnish startup ecosystem, which I was very interested in, is all concentrated around here.

The room for electives had been another major criteria in my choice of major and now I was able to utilize all that capacity for picking the best courses that gave me deadlines and study credits for projects that I would have wanted to do anyway; a probabilistic top-down strategy game in Programming Studio A, dynamic web applications in Design of WWW-Services, data analysis as continuation to my economics essay in Machine Learning, dynamic map- and graph-based data visualization in Data Science Project and Information Visualization, networking bracelet prototypes in Design Thinking and Electronic Prototyping, my personal portfolio website in Basics of Web Publishing and a whole host of hardware projects ranging from 3D-printed tesseracts, laser-cut dragon construction kits and cast lightsabers to CNC custom kitchen shelves and a gesture-controlled lamp along with all the associated electronics designs, PCBs and much more.

This gets us to my main point: whatever you want to do, you must build a portfolio.

This is where the advantage of the generalist lies and why there is a bit of a modern generalist renaissance, powered by the ever more powerful tools that supercharge skills and knowledge acquisition if you are deliberate in their use. The marginal benefit of each new project in the same niche decreases rapidly in terms of your ability to attract recruiters, mentors, co-founders, customers or team members, whoever you might be looking for.

I got my internship at Nokia by explaining just one machine learning project with sufficient detail and enthusiasm to demonstrate my knowledge and interest in the 20-minute interview. I started at Miitti actually doing sales rather than software development, and got that original position partly by spinning my economics EE market research, interviewing CFOs of music production software companies and collecting hundreds of survey responses from their users, as equivalent to outbound sales.

If you have ever just lightly touched a niche, you are likely already more knowledgeable in it than a specialist in another field, trying to make the switch. You will never beat the specialist in their niche, but if you know multiple adjacent or otherwise synergistic niches to a similar total depth as the specialist knows their one topic, you are often more valuable in many real world situations, as much of progress and innovation is made at the intersections of different disciplines.

To then directly answer the question of what to study as a generalist: it most likely matters less than you worry it does. My advice is to try to cluster your interests a little and pick the largest economically viable cluster as your base subject, i.e. pick the subject based on what relates to most of your interests directly or indirectly. Adding up all the vectors representing the directions and magnitudes of your different interests rarely amounts to zero and such, there is usually a main moment. Then pick the program based on which gives you the most flexibility for electives and minors and ensure that you choose your courses carefully to maximize portfolio-worthy project work, developing real, tangible skills.

What is also great about projects is that they force you to focus on things one at a time. The way to becoming a truly competent generalist goes through many periods of obsessive focus on different things. You will never be able to enjoy all your interests at once. The maximum for simultaneous interests in which one can actively improve in at once is likely around three; profession, recreation and health.

Therefore, never let inspiration slip. If you get the urge to go all in on something, do it fully for a while. Skills and knowledge compound and transfer. If you were to change sports, arts or crafts every year, focusing fully for that year, you wouldn’t become the best of course, but you can quite quickly make it to the 0.1% of global population in almost anything with full focus and thus build tens of competencies over the years. Doing things one at a time allow you to cover much more ground overall than trying to do all of them at once. This is precisely the dilemma, I understand, but depth is required as well and only attainable through sufficient immersion. Worry less about the opportunity cost of doing the wrong thing and more about the cost of not doing anything.

Aim to go to the places where the people you admire go. Ecosystem is everything. Go to all the events they go to and get to know the local insider information. The vast majority of opportunities open up through networking with the right people and if you can surround yourself with people interested in the same things as you are, you are going to make much more progress in all your endeavors merely due to mutual expectations.

Now that you have picked a suitable major that enables your minor and course picks, you can freely take license to pursue any of the other interests outside your studies, as given that you really study to understand for yourself and fulfill all your obligations, you’re automatically making progress in that dimension already. The abovementioned people can be different for each interest and they will each naturally pull you forward in their respective dimensions just by it rubbing off on you.

Finally, it is always better to keep moving and do something rather than nothing. If nothing else, take the three categories of profession, recreation and health and randomize your choices for each category. You will quickly notice whether you made the right choice or whether you want to course correct. Making decisions is often more about discovering and justifying your intuitions than consciously trying to solve for the answer. Thus, like when riding a bike, momentum makes it easier to steer or even turn around completely when you are actively living and experiencing the consequences of your choices, rather than theorizing about hypotheticals without real feedback.

If all else fails, pile it all onto your plate at once and see what falls out. This is the ultimate forcing function and definitely the most extreme measure, but infinitely preferrable to inaction, which you have to avoid at all costs. Your interests have a hierarchy in each moment, whether you are aware of it or not, and it will get naturally revealed by what you end up prioritizing once you simply run out of time to handle it all. The more that you have to do, the more productivity you have to squeeze out of each hour until it’s just no longer possible to fit it all. This is not failure, but you discovering your primary interests in the moment. Now you can double down, set aside everything else for the moment and focus fully on the core things until your interests shift and it’s time to repeat the cycle again.

This is the life of the generalist.