Creative Generalist
I had an epiphany tonight. Or rather, I discovered an epiphany. (?) Since the turn of the century, I’ve had this weird outlook on my job. My boss has been telling me that my position is a hard one to categorize because on one hand, I’m considered support staff, but usually support staff means that i’m assigned to one pastor, ala administrative assistants. On the other hand, I basically create and manage my own work, so I’m kind of on my own. It’s part of the reason it’s hard to define my salary because somewhere in global church hierarchy, there’s not really something that has that kind of job description, unless you count a Creative Director who moonlights as an I.T. Specialist, but I don’t even think that covers the scope of things. Anyway, after doing some searching, I’ve come down to discovering what I’ve been thinking all along, but have lacked the specifics to voice it: i’m a Creative Generalist.
So, what is a Creative Generalist? Well, a generalist by definition would be the antonym of specialist. Knowledge, aptitude, and skills applied to a field as a whole. If you think about it, the world is really driven by specialists. There are so many niche fields out there, and they they definitely have their value. Think of of doctors, or educators, or even artists who specialize in fields. Those people definitely needed; they are the innovators, the inventors of artificial hearts, discoverers of new technologies, creators of music styles, or what have you. Well, I’m not one of those people. I’m not doing anything new, in fact, if you ask me, I don’t even drawn inspiration from traditional forms like a classically trained artist does. I’m a product of a technological generation. I draw inspiration from a such a vast wealth of information, so much information that I barely hold onto inspirational ideas long enough for them to make an impression. I could make a career of listening to music, exploring websites, journals, reading books, you name it. It’s almost like an anthropological endeavor that gets funneled into a communication medium. Am I making any sense here?
All I really know is that I feel like up to this point I’ve been trying to carve a niche for myself, like everyone else is, but now I feel like what used to be just a hobby of trying to sample a little bit of everything, has really ended up giving me this fairly expansive world view (although not TOO expansive, I still have allot to go), that I have in turned applied to what I do. I mean, lots of professions are basically lifelong educational experiences, like in the medical field. I’m sure doctors are always reading up on new applied sciences in their field and trying to do things better. You don’t really hear about this happening a broad sense though, do you? More and more now, as this information age expands, and as information comes at us ever faster and even more fragmented, I think that there’s going to be a need for generalists who can distill ideas, make sense of it all and act on it.
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