Weekly Roundup: Deep-Generalist, Holiday Dinner & Web3

What we learned together on Network Capital this week

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Dear community members,

Hope you had a rejuvenating weekend. This is a quick overview of the week gone by on Network Capital. You can get access to all our offerings once you subscribe.

✨ Registrations open for the Deep-Generalist Fellowship

🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏾 NC Holiday Dinner: Delhi, Goa, Kolkata, London, Paris, Mumbai, and Boston

If you google the term ‘Deep-Generalist’ the first article that appears is Utkarsh’s MINT piece titled ‘Why deep generalists may soon replace specialists at the workplace

In most modern workplaces, a disproportionate emphasis is paid on having narrow skills that are marketable. While there is nothing wrong having an area of focus, one should be mindful of the perils of early specialization.

There are three key reason for that.

  1. We tend to specialize without knowing why. More than 80% of people work in areas that have nothing to do with their field of study.

  2. It hinders lateral thinking, a problem-solving approach that draws upon seemingly disparate concepts and domains. Most innovators are lateral thinkers. Their lateral thinking is a direct result of combining different strands of thoughts and learning from different contexts.

  3. People with a narrow set of skills tend to approach every problem through the same lens. This not only ignores loopholes in one’s hypothesis but also amplifies biases. As investor Charlie Munger puts it, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Deep-Generalists are people who combine two or more diverse domains and integrate them into something defensible and unique. These are the professionals who will push the boundaries for creativity and innovation in the AI era. Their competitive advantage will propel them to learn, unlearn and develop innovative solutions consistently.

Starts December 11, 2021

NC Holiday Dinners

✨ Join in for an evening of interesting discussions, drinks & dinner ✨

​To celebrate the holiday season with Network Capital community members in your city, join in on our ‘Holiday Dinners’ series.

​We kick this off on Dec 17, 2021 with the first Holiday Dinner in Delhi followed by Goa, Kolkata, London, Paris, Mumbai, Boston, and more!

The ticket for the Holiday Dinner includes -

  1. ​Drinks & dinners

  2. ​One month access to the Network Capital subscription

  3. ​An evening of interesting discussions with NC members

​PS. Existing subscribers, can get their discounted tickets for $6 here.

​Details of the venue and event will be sent to those you have purchased the tickets. Limited spots available.

Newsletter

If everything was figured out, efficient and straightforward, why should the world/your company/your community reward you for it? Clarity is power but the lack of clarity doesn’t mean powerlessness. It simply means that you are in the process of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. This process is often accompanied by frustration, confusion, exhaustion and hopelessness. That is why one needs to look at the road to clarity as a journey, not a destination.

Validation is an assessment of worthiness. When someone goes out of the way to seek validation, we call them desperate and attention hungry. When someone is oblivious to how s/he comes across, we call them self-assured on some days and arrogant on others. We are all - in some shape or form - seeking validation from someone somewhere. In this newsletter, we will unpack the difference between external and internal validation, and attempt to examine the impact on our lives

There is significant excitement about Indian origin CEO Parag Agrawal taking over the reigns of Twitter from the co-founder of the platform, Jack Dorsey. Parag joined the company as an engineer, rose to become the CTO and is known to be one of the most trusted confidantes of Dorsey. They both share deep conviction about the power of cryptocurrency and that partly explains this surprising and unexpected decision by the CEO of a company that did very well in the pandemic, added a range of exciting products, acquired a bunch of companies and cloned Clubhouse’s audio feature with breakneck speed. Why did Jack Dorsey resign and what does this mean for the future of media?

Thank you for being a subscriber/member to Network Capital this year. This holiday season, consider giving the gift of a paid subscription to a friend, family member, or colleague you think might enjoy it.

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Network Capital get access to:

  • Full access to subgroups – sector, location, industry, higher studies, scholarship etc

  • Cohort based fellowships + Daily office hours for 1:1 mentoring with leaders of distinguished credentials

  • Masterclasses by CEOs, Nobel Laureates, distinguished writers, investors and young visionaries

A gift subscription is a unique and thoughtful way to share the writing you enjoy with someone close to you. Plus, it helps to support the ongoing work that goes into this publication.

An Invitation to Network Capital

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💝 If you want to learn how to navigate the Network Capital ecosystem, please read this article.

💞 Read our founder Utkarsh Amitabh’s book Seductive Illusion of Hard Work. The foreword written by Klaus Schwab, the founder of World Economic Forum.