Jimmy Kimmel bakes pizzas in a custom brick oven at his home in LA.

I learned this fun fact watching an episode of Chrissy and Dave Dine Out on a plane ride over the Atlantic. Which means this also could have been a dream.

I don't know why this detail stuck out to me.

Maybe it's the fact that a man viewed by 1.7 million people every night has hobbies.

I have this idea that the only way you achieve greatness is through unrelenting and all-consuming focus on the thing you want to be great at. Jimmy Kimmel doesn't become Jimmy Kimmel by having hobbies.

My bias stems from the way our culture emphasizes specialization from such a young age. In his book Range, David Epstein describes this as "the cult of the head start."

The beauty and joy that accompanies youth sports is eroding as parents (mostly fathers) watch YouTube videos of a very cute 2-year-old Tiger Woods swinging a golf club. We've been told that relentless specialization is the path to success and we've started pursuing it earlier and earlier. For Tiger Woods, early specialization worked, but Epstein elegantly paints a picture of other more winding roads to success.

• Roger Federer dabbled in lots of sports before focusing on tennis in high school.
• Duke Ellington ignored music lessons as a kid to focus on drawing and baseball.
• Vincent van Gogh failed as a teacher, a bookseller, and priest before he discovered that he could paint. (At 27 years old.)

Epstein makes the case that generalists triumph in a specialized world. He paints a portrait of winding roads to excellence plagued and even enhanced by setbacks.

A major advantage that generalists have over specialists:

Generalists experience serendipity.

The connecting of rarely connected dots. The intersection of wildly disparate paths.

Nonprofit leaders are almost always generalists. They're dabblers and tinkerers and figure-it-outers. (It's what I love about you people.)

If you are reading this, it's because you did not specialize in software.

You discovered that technology was integral to every facet of your work, and you decided you wanted to get better at it.

In other words, you decided to learn how to bake pizzas.

I think you've made a great choice–and not just because you subscribe to my newsletter. I'm convinced that Epstein is right, that the future belongs to those who are relentlessly willing to learn something new. Those who do not fear becoming "deliberate amateurs."

I'm grateful to help you on your journey.

In other news, I'm baking pizza tonight.

Ted