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Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849).

Charles Durant went on to write the first American book on seaweed, and according to this article, at least, the best one. The whole article is worth reading, especially if like me, you’re interested in seaweed.

Product management is a generalist’s field. You do a little bit of user research, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of design and a little bit of engineering. Everyone you work with is better at what they do than you are, yet you still have to find a way to help them.

Within a field of generalists, I am a generalist PM. I’ve worked across agriculture, ad tech, consumer social, and most recently fintech. This makes me doubly a generalist.

Perhaps because of this, I am especially appreciative of the art of being a useful generalist, which Ross Simoini captures so well in this article. Here’s an excerpt:

In this way, the generalist must have a high tolerance for complexity, confusion, and uncertainty. Generalism does not offer the clearly tiered progression offered to the specialist. Working across various fields means you will likely spend long periods being unskilled at them. The generalist can acquire new talents, but they are also a perpetual amateur in a cycle of discovery and failure. There are benefits to this process: slowness encourages a certain quality of attention; novelty encourages a sharp perspective; and an outsider’s position keeps you immune from the insider’s tunnel vision.

Specialism, on the other hand, offers an easily measured form of success. In fact, specialization usually defines a spectrum of success and failure.“Best” and “worst” can exist only when the boundaries of success have been narrowed to a single parameter: the best RBI hitter in baseball; the most dividends earned in a single day.

I left this article thinking there should be a Society for Generalists the way there is are professional groups for specialities. Worth reading the entire thing, especially if you’re a generalist.