All of us have heard the phrase “Jack of all trades” which seems to have quite a negative aftertaste. I was told at school that being good at all subjects is not possible because people have two types of brain: humanitarian and analytical. It is not possible to be good at both at the same time and learning and developing yourself by diversifying into 2 absolutely different directions makes you “Jack of all trades” and means you are “a master of none”. Have we heard about this phrase before? I bet you did! and you reading this now too!
For me personally this is a very confusing to sort of negatively describe a person who wants and pursues personal and professional development in different areas even if they are disconnected. I am a life time learner and if I am interested in any business area, industry, technological trend, etc. I am learning and developing myself in this field. I am not becoming a narrow expert in the field but it provides to me a significat advantage in the professional arena. Why? The reason is simple: I have a wider scope and vision on multile things. I am entering the hyperspecialization where a lot of my skills can be probing and application of knowledge. This may look iefficient however that is a key to innovation and a different way of looking at problems and finding solutions. When we work, we may find lunch time inefficient but during lunchtime while chatting with colleagues, a lot of new ideas may pop up (as well as missed out if you eat at your desk), for example.
Do you know that specialization in one field is like a double sword: it is great because you are an expert in a certain area, but it also limits you to this area and makes you blind to other things you could potentially do. Think of the great and creative minds we all know like Van Gogh, Michelagelo, Darwin and check out their stories and how they found what they were extremely good at while delevoping multi skills sets in other professional areas.
In my opinion, we are entering the era of hyperspecialization and multi-skilling. The person of today with a very narrow specialization can be easily replace with a machine who can do a repetitive task (check vending machines, accounting software, MOOCs, music playlists generated by a computor, booksotres replaced by e-libraries and a lot of other tools!) The traditional human skills and specialization is disrupted by computor and digital.
The great news for creative and curious! keep on being curious, keep on developing and learning. It’s not only for businesses to transfrm digitally or die, it is for humans/professionals to acquire new skills or you are replaced.
Today, it is not the way to have a fixed plan or a goal and work from the goal backwards. We must work towards the situations that occur in our professional lives. Just think of the job you do today and I bet you have not studied in college or university to do it! We had to adopt to the professional life. The individual who is a generalist rather than a specialist, versatile and adept at many things, can strive in the economy of the future.
Ah! let’s come back to the “Jack of all trades”! Do you know the complete phrase? I will leave it here for you to think it over.
“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
If you are looking for a read on this topic, here are 2 books that I liked:
- “Range” by David Epstein
- “The multi-hyphen Life” by Emma Gannon.
