These days, the creative industries are a fluid space. We’ve heard the praise for hybrid creatives, witnessed curious celebrity side-steps into creative direction roles, entered an era of side hustles, and seen once-siloed industries like design and advertising become bedfellows. The permission to try your hand at something else, a hangover of the pandemic, seems here to stay.

It appears that now more than ever, it is a good time to be a generalist. David Epstein was writing about this back in 2019 in his book Range, which argued why the seemingly more creative, more agile generalists thrive in a world full of specialists. The book made the case that technology is more and more able to execute those specialised jobs – and this before the rise of generative AI in the last year or two. What technology is not able to do, the book suggested, is join up the dots between different ideas, perspectives or fields, ultimately producing something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s quite a different take to that of ad veteran John Hegarty who recently took to social media to say that “Generalists do not produce greatness. Specialists do.” (The responses were unsurprisingly in disagreement.)

Of course, the notion that a computer is more capable than a human expert might seem reductive to anyone who has wholeheartedly pursued a single creative discipline. But Epstein’s overarching point around giving yourself a competitive advantage against what some clients will see as the cheaper, faster machine still stands. Generalising can be seen as a method of making yourself as bulletproof as possible in an increasingly financially tenuous industry.