Why I'm building this

I'm Rik Visser. I've made a feature film, traded options for three years at Optiver, built a software company and run a co-working space. On paper that looks random.

When I quit my last job, a lot of people asked why. I quit a company I'd founded, with a stable income. And I'd done this before. So why am I the kind of person who leaves after five to eight years? I'm hardly alone, so this is more a description of a way of managing a career.

Since 2022 I've given lectures at the University of Amsterdam on exactly this. There are two ways to see a generalist. One is as somebody lacking any deep expertise in anything. That's where jack of all trades comes from. The other is somebody who has made a specialism out of being a generalist. Almost none of the students were thinking about their career as a whole. At best they were thinking about their next job. People my own age were no different.

So I wanted to start by identifying the skills that generalists need. But as it turns out, there's more than one type of generalist. My buddy Jouke has held a bunch of roles within FrieslandCampina: varied in roles, narrow in environment. A nurse might hold the same role in hospitals, prison clinics and clinics in the developing world: similar roles, wildly different environments. Leonardo da Vinci did all his diversity at the same time. Benjamin Franklin did one thing for years, then moved to the next. The advice and the skills for each of these shapes are not the same.

Being an Excel fanatic and a nerd at heart, I couldn't help making a typology of careers. It started as a typology of generalists, but even specialists are not as uniform as you would think. It has sixteen career types, in four families.

Personality tests look at the wrong traits for this. They are very useful for finding roles you can do, or environments that suit you. They don't tell you whether you should be an Adapter, competent in many roles in many environments, or a Polymath, seeking mastery in many things at the same time. That is very closely tied to who you are, and it needs different traits.

And once we know what career types fit you, we can look at the skills you need to manage such a career, which are different from the skills you need to do a job. A great accountant knows accountancy. But if you're the kind of person who needs to do accountancy in many different environments or you'll get bored, you also need the skills to move between them without damaging your career. Ideally, you improve it.

The people I meet at the university, young and old, need to find a path. They don't know how to move from one role to another without losing momentum, or how to keep a coherent story as they go. That creates a lot of stress and anxiety, and much of it can be alleviated by having this conversation.

So I wrote down what those conversations taught me: sixteen ways to build a career, and how to pick one on purpose.

Rik Visser