How to Be Better at Almost Everything

by Pat Flynn

  But before the writing came the research, into which Dunnett dove with vigor. She became a short-term specialist in the ages in which her books were set, going so far as to develop a new historical theory regarding the protagonist of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. But then it was on to the writing—the depth of her characters and her understanding of the historical time period in which they dwelt earned Dunnett international praise. When not writing these historical fiction tomes, Dunnett stretched her creative writing muscle and wrote lighthearted detective works.

  Throughout her many years as a writer and artist, Dunnett also used business, networking, and personal skills to advance Scottish culture and the arts, serving the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish National War Memorial, and the Edinburgh Book Festival. She was also an executive director of Scottish Television and, along with her husband, was integral in developing the Edinburgh Festival, the world’s largest arts festival.

  Creative and personable, sharp and savvy, Dorothy Dunnett was truly a generalist.

  DAVE FREES

  * * *

  Dave Frees, estate lawyer, stand-up comedian, reporter, photographer, author, tae kwon do black belt, dedicated family man, world traveler, and, as Steve Forbes, editor in chief of Forbes magazine called him, “Grand Master of communications and persuasion skills,” was told as a child by his grandfather that he was an “unfocused dilettante.”

  Even at the young age of nine, Dave would immerse himself fully in a study or skill that fascinated him—geology, photography, anything—and for months focus on that one thing until he was “good to great” at it. Then? He’d move on to the next skill, the next study, working tirelessly to learn all he could, or rather, as he got older, all that he needed to, in order to make money from it. Because, as Frees says, money is a motivator, so if somebody was willing to pay him, that must mean he was doing a good to great job at whatever it was they were paying him to do.

  As a young man, a local newspaper paid him to be a photographer. He wasn’t so bad at writing so he offered to write articles to complement the photos he took. As a reporter, he learned invaluable listening and interviewing skills, and he learned how to tell stories. He was adventurous, traveling the world with his college sweetheart turned wife and learning languages, at least passably. He started companies through hard work and tenacity.

  These skills stacked one on top of the other so that wherever he went—New Zealand as a Rotary exchange student at the age of sixteen, Australia, Great Britain, the University of Pennsylvania Law School—he was able to listen, truly listen, to people, engage with them, and connect with them. They made him successful enough as a stand-up comedian. Now, with his estate-planning clients, these skills help him alleviate tension during a process that is usually somber and quite stressful. He uses his photography skills to create and design images for his law firm’s marketing campaigns. His writing and storytelling skills translate to effective marketing.

  As Frees says, “To outsiders, this life looks chaotic and unfocused, but to me it’s always been a rich tapestry of skill sets that fit together and serve me well.” Indeed, they do, as they would for any true expert generalist.

  DAN JOHN

  * * *

  These days Dan John is what I like to call a “master generalist,” a person who exemplifies generalism by successfully combining seemingly incongruent skill sets.

  Dan grew up playing sports out on his neighborhood streets in South San Francisco. Playing football for school was the dream, but a brush with discus throwing helped steer him on another path, sending this Fulbright Scholar to the weight room where he began lifting weights and putting on muscle, a fortuitous move that shot him into All-American status in track and field.

  Unsatisfied with life only as an athlete, John pursued studies in religion. He graduated college with a masters in theology and has gone on to teach religious studies to adults both domestically and abroad.

  John is the American record holder for the weight pentathlon and the inventor of an exercise (have you ever heard of the goblet squat?), and a philosopher, a professor of theology, and an author, as well. He’s also fantastically personable, the type of father figure you’d want to have a tumbler of whiskey with or invite to speak at your wedding.

  John has successfully combined his skills of writing with strength training and athletics to coach and influence an entire population of professional athletes and amateur exercisers. His deep understanding of religion, along with his people skills, critical thinking abilities, and downright common sense, has helped him create his own philosophy, both inside and outside the weight room, that has shaped his and countless others’ lives, including my own.

  HEDY LAMARR

  * * *

  Best known as a Hollywood bombshell of the 1930s and ’40s, Hedy Lamarr wasn’t merely a pretty face on the big screen.

  Though Lamarr got an early start to stardom in Europe in the early 1930s, it wasn’t until she fled the Third Reich and came to America that her acting career blossomed. During this time, however, she devoted herself to more than just scripts and screenplays. Along with composer George Antheil, Lamarr invented “frequency hopping,” a way of avoiding signal jamming by jumping around radio frequencies. This invention, for which she was awarded a patent, helped form the technologies responsible for Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi.

  When Lamarr wasn’t “tinkering” or acting in films, she was a dedicated charity fund-raiser, film producer, and writer. She relied on her various skills to push her career forward, scratch the inventive itch, and become a surprisingly adept generalist of the twentieth century.

  SPENCER NADOLSKY

  * * *

  Dr. Spencer Nadolsky is a revolutionary voice in health care, focusing on lifestyle changes rather than medications to improve his patients’ health and doing so in a radical way—in a completely online clinic. He is an obesity doctor, general practitioner, author, marketer, athlete, and, along with myself and Somnath Sikdar, the cofounder of Strong ON! Dr. Spencer is “the Doc Who Lifts.”

  Growing up in small-town Michigan, Spencer was drawn to athletics so, naturally, when he enrolled in the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for exercise science and premed, he also went in for sports such as heavyweight wrestling and did pretty well during his undergraduate tenure.

  Then it was off to medical school and residency (and meeting the love of his life, Jenna), all the while learning more about nutrition and keeping up with his own fitness and health. He wound up on the path that most doctors follow: working in an office, where the number of patients he could help was limited by the number of hours in the workday.

  But Nadolsky felt he could do more and that his purpose in life was to help more people than a clinical setting would allow. So he began to branch out, learning effective marketing skills (email and content marketing, in particular) to build an online presence across social platforms. He wrote a book called The Fat Loss Prescription based on the successes he’d helped his patients achieve as an obesity medicine doctor. He launched a line of supplements. He speaks at countless seminars and conferences each year, building his network and practicing his networking skills.

  Then, in 2017, he took the leap and moved his entire practice online, offering everything an in-person doctor could but doing it completely online. This radical approach helps him do what he wants most—to help as many people as possible and to spread the gospel of a healthy lifestyle. By stacking his medical background with his athletic abilities; his creativity, marketing, writing, and networking skills; and his business acumen, Dr. Spencer Nadolsky has taken his medical practice beyond the clinic, reaching thousands of patients, social media followers, and members of Strong ON! and teaching them to live the best, healthiest lives possible. And along the way, he has become an exemplary generalist.

  LOU SCHULER

  * * *

  Whatever versatility Lou Schuler has, he’ll admit he just stumbled into it.

  Schuler, a fitness journali
st and author, often tells the story of how he got interested in fitness: Growing up in Saint Louis, Missouri, he really wanted to be good at sports but was consistently the slowest, skinniest, weakest, and most four-eyed kid who showed up to play. That’s why he started working out when he was thirteen. Both he and his older brother hit the weights together and neither of them had any idea what they were doing, but they kept at it until they got a little stronger and a little less slow.

  Writing is another area where he thrashed around until finding his niche. He wanted to write fiction and screenplays, but even as a teenager he knew the odds were stacked against making a living as a novelist or screenwriter, and he had no desire to go to a big city and starve or freeze to death while he waited for his big break. So he decided to head to college and major in journalism. As luck would have it, he went to the University of Missouri, which has one of the best journalism programs in the country, without paying out-of-state tuition.

  For ten years after college, Schuler bounced back and forth between jobs at newspapers and magazines and stints where he focused on fiction and screenwriting while waiting tables to pay the bills. By the time he got his first job at a fitness magazine, in 1992, he’d been working out consistently for twenty-two years, and for more than a decade he’d been writing fiction and nonfiction for hours a day, virtually every day. So even though he had written, at most, a half-dozen articles specific to health or fitness, he’d knocked out hundreds about everything else, along with thousands of pages of novels and screenplays. He’d even done some stand-up comedy right after college. And now, with the rest of the world getting more interested in fitness and nutrition, he found himself in the right place, at the right time, with the right mix of technical skills, creative energy, and sense of humor.

  He still needed to develop expertise in fitness and nutrition, and that was a struggle. Without a background in science beyond high school classes in biology and chemistry, and knowing nothing about statistics, Schuler dove into the science behind the fitness, and earning those credentials made him “bilingual”: he was now fluent in English and geekish. The payoff? He can interview a scientist without sounding like an idiot and then write an entertaining article that a nonscientist can understand, weaving a story that reflects the creative problem-solving skills of a fiction writer.

  SOMNATH SIKDAR

  * * *

  The first time Somnath Sikdar, now a sixth-degree tae kwon do black belt, walked into a martial arts facility, he was six years old, filled with visions of ninjas based on the, at the time, newly released movie Karate Kid II. Of course, back then, Som couldn’t know that he’d just become a student at the very same facility he would, twenty-some years later, own.

  But there were a lot of years—and a lot of skills to develop—in between throwing his very first kick to becoming the owner of a martial arts facility and an entrepreneur, publisher, business consultant, and marketer.

  Som continued to attend tae kwon do classes, becoming more and more disciplined over the years. In the months leading up to a summer-long vacation to India, he practiced extra each day so that he wouldn’t lose the skills he’d already developed. Perhaps back then, he didn’t realize he was developing the skill that would be most crucial to his entrepreneurial success later on in life: discipline.

  He earned his first-degree junior black belt at the age of nine, then his second, and by the time he had gone off to college, he had already attained his third dan. With his family’s encouragement, Sikdar attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BSE in electrical engineering and minored in systems science and economics. During his college tenure, as well as afterward, Sikdar coached competitive tae kwon do teams at the collegiate level. He even used his combative skills as an extra in a martial arts film.

  But Sikdar’s successes go beyond martial arts. He, along with two other former peewee tae kwon do students, bought the Dragon Gym from their former teacher, Master Chae Teok Goh. Only in his twenties, Sikdar had to switch gears from the methodical perspective of engineering to its creative perspective—learning how to effectively market his gym through email and direct mail; increase class attendance; and broaden the gym’s offerings (he added kettlebell training and Muay Thai classes, as well as yoga, physical therapy, and massage therapy). But the skills in process management that he developed in college and the discipline he developed throughout his formative years served him well as he created and shaped the systems necessary to run the business and improve the dojang he grew up in. He published books on martial arts and kettlebell training. He markets, fills, and hosts certifications and workshops each year and advises both local and national business masterminds.

  Along with myself and Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, Sikdar is a cofounder of Strong ON!, and Dragon Gym is now the worldwide Strong ON! headquarters. Sikdar’s expertise in running a brick-and-mortar martial arts and workout facility makes him invaluable as a business coach and consultant to the countless personal trainers and kettlebell instructors whom we help through our Strong ON! franchise program. He is also the cohost of a weekly online show, In Top Form, with another of our profiled generalists, Dave Frees. The show teaches viewers how to develop a diverse set of skills to optimize their lives and livelihoods.

  From a self-proclaimed “weak, small, and shy child” to an electrical engineer, sixth-degree tae kwon do black belt, and entrepreneur, Som Sikdar embodies the generalist—a person who can effectively blend and stack a variety of skills to gain a competitive edge.

  DONALD TRUMP

  * * *

  As the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump may be the most polarizing of our case studies. But love him or hate him, he’s a great example of a generalist.

  After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Donald Trump took over running the family real estate business, a position he held from 1971 until 2017. While at the helm of the now-named Trump Organization, he expanded the company’s role beyond the building and managing of real estate properties, such as golf courses, casinos, and hotels, and diversified into hundreds of side ventures.

  Trump was heavily involved in various sporting events, from the defunct New Jersey Generals football team to the hosting of Mike Tyson’s 1988 heavyweight championship fight. He even went on to be Tyson’s financial adviser. He also owned stakes in the Miss Universe pageant and ran the Trump University real estate training program.

  Outside these business ventures, Trump has coauthored several books and has made cameo appearances in movies and TV shows since the 1990s, not including his role as executive producer and host of the wildly popular reality shows The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice, which aired for fourteen seasons and inspired international spin-offs.

  Then, in 2016, Donald Trump announced his presidential bid (politics had been on his radar since the late 1980s), putting him in yet another field entirely, one that called on all his past skill development to catapult him to the forefront of a packed presidential race.

  The running and creating of business entities is Trump’s foremost skill and the one he stacked all others on top of. However, a lot goes into “running a business”—managerial skills, financial management skills, risk mitigation skills, marketing skills, networking skills. Trump’s ability to get as far as he did in both the public eye and the political landscape speaks to his people and communication skills. The man also knows how to entertain or at least, for better or for worse, how to hold people’s attention. These wide-ranging yet congruent skills helped Trump create success over the past forty-five-plus years, and all these skills culminated to help him win the 2016 US presidential election.

  MARK TWAIN

  * * *

  Mark Twain—Samuel Langhorne Clemens—was a humorist, author, performer, lecturer, inventor, publisher, and entrepreneur, and he was the Great American Generalist.

  While his legacy now places him squarely in the category of writer, Twain came from a wide and varied backgrou
nd. Without this breadth over depth approach, he would not have enjoyed the successes he did in life nor would he have become the storied figure of history he is today.

  Enamored with steamboats, Twain worked as a steamboat pilot for three years until the Civil War forced him into other work. Fascinated by science, he befriended Nikola Tesla and tinkered away in Tesla’s laboratory. Twain obtained his first of three patents on December 19, 1871. Tempted by adventure, he became secretary to the Nevada Territory governor, a silver miner, and an overseas newspaper correspondent.

  Talented in performing, he took to the stage, regaling audiences with his adventures and delighting them with his quirky sense of humor. He became the world’s first stand-up comedian, performing around the world in 1895 (to pay off his debts—money management wasn’t in his skill set).

  Each and every one of his experiences, passions, and jobs at one time or another stacked on his primary skill—writing. Steamboats and river life featured heavily in his most famous works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Science and technology were a focus of his alternate history novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And his travels were recounted and, much to the amusement of his readership, stretched and poked and prodded to become hilarious and poignant commentaries in Roughing It and The Innocents Abroad.

  He developed his skill set over a lifetime, surging in some areas, maintaining in others, to create a career and a legacy that surpass those of any other American writer, then and now. Twain was the quintessential generalist.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR