The charge against the generalist is shallowness, and it is wrong. Depth is real and indispensable; the quarrel is only over whether you must live in it. The first thesis of The Generalist Manifesto answers no: depth is not a place you inhabit but a place you visit, again and again, in many countries. The specialist digs one well and mistakes it for the world. The generalist digs a hundred, and learns where the water actually runs.
That hundredth descent is the point. No single well reveals the watershed; only the pattern across them draws the map. This is breadth-with-depth-on-demand, not dilettantism — the dilettante never reaches water at all, while the generalist goes down hard, repeatedly, and surfaces with the lie of the land.
What makes the visit cheap enough to repeat is the mastery of beginning, and what makes the count add up is the arithmetic of breadth.