Demystifying The Old Saying: Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None

If you’re a person with a multitude of interests and passions and have the undying urge to explore new things and acquire more knowledge and different skills, although they may be poles apart from each other at times, you’ve probably been branded by society as a “jack of all trades, and master of none.”

It’s amusing, lacking any sense of reason and unbelievably annoying.

This has been the case with me throughout my professional career after graduating from college with an undergraduate degree in engineering. But before I tell you my story, here’s a bit of a delve into the origins of the term and how most importantly, it was re-invented after the turn of the 19th and 20th century, to include the “master of none” addition to the saying.

The History Of The Term

A bit of research on the term, reveals the following:

The earliest recorded uses of the label “jack of all trades” emerged in the 17th century and it didn’t actually include the second part — “master of none”.

Up until the 17th century the term was used simply as “jack of all trades” and was used particularly to admire and praise individuals for having multiple talents.

The latter part of the saying, i.e. the “master of none” label emerged after the systems we see in place today began to form in their infancy as they began to be propagated after the industrial revolution.

The dogma of specialization and specializing in only a certain educational pursuit or skill, based on the entire college education racket, and I call it a racket because although I’ve had a college education, and it’s sort of valuable in its own ways (mostly experience and networking), colleges simply want to attract more students to pay their exorbitant fees and push out more job-ready youngsters into the workforce on an endless conveyor belt.

Also now, because the system demands it, you can’t get a higher paying job or role unless you have that sh*tty piece of paper. B-School apparently. A college is also very much a business that’s looking to make money. You just have to look past the masquerade.

So the “master of none” tag was added perhaps to begin to club people into these boxes for the emerging jobs at the time.

This was perhaps done to ensure conformity and make the workforce feel more comfortable working in an environment where they performed the same repetitive tasks to earn a living, by making any other pursuit of anything different, out of the box, or an alternative to their primary job duties, seem as unattractive as possible.

Being “clubbed into dank submission” as Bukowski puts it, became the easiest way to guarantee workers working for the jobs that were emerging at the time.

This has become the norm these days, when in actual fact being a “polymath” was once regarded as the highest distinction of achievement back during the Renaissance.

As this particular writer on Metalearn named Nasos Papadopoulos notes:

“During the Renaissance, a polymath was seen as a perfected individual, someone who had mastered intellectual, artistic and physical pursuits. Hence the term “Renaissance Man” or “Renaissance Soul” that’s still often used to describe people with multiple interests to this day.

Leonardo da Vinci was said to be just as proud of his ability in geometry, architecture and math as he was with his artistic pursuits.

Da Vinci was one of the most famous polymaths who ever lived and along with other notable figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Johann Goethe, pushed the boundaries of what many believed to be possible.

Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten the insights that these exceptional figures gave us into the benefits of pursuing multiple interests.”

You can read his story here.

The College Conundrum

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a good solid education. From school to high school(junior college in Mumbai) and an undergraduate degree in IT from MIT, Manipal.

Most, or I would say the majority of the Indian population don’t have access to a higher education because it’s simply just too expensive. However, it’s slowly improving and we’re seeing more influx of Indian students from lower-income backgrounds in colleges these days.

But that being said, online learning is transforming the landscape and situation in the country and companies & NGOs like Rocket Learning and others are uplifting rural communities and children in India by giving them access to education.

Rocket learning in particular, leverages WhatsApp as a means of educating children in remote parts of India, as they have access to smartphones and the messaging service in those regions. It’s innovative and they’re doing some great work.

But coming back, college has its pros and cons.

On one hand, it teaches you to think critically, read and research and present ideas and your perspective well apart from the subjects you study, which may or may not translate to proficiency at a particular skill. And also, the experience while you’re there and networking with your college mates after schooling, the latter of which is perhaps an unmatched and underrated facet.

However, if you’re a fish out of water in college, where you’re simply not interested in the main subjects you’re specializing in. It can get a bit tricky.

College basically prepares you for becoming part of the white collar workforce. There are others that pursue academia, and continue studying; as Chat GPT tells me:

• A rough estimate would be that around 5–15% of college graduates worldwide choose to pursue careers in academia.
• Approximately 1–5% of college graduates worldwide might opt to pursue Ph.D. programs

So that leaves roughly 85–95% of graduates worldwide being thrust back on that conveyor belt back into the white collar workforce.

College is not a waste of time, it’s definitely a great ride, but it makes you conform and limit yourself to a tunneled specialization depending on your subject(s) of choice, in a way that might not seem obvious at the onset.

You’re urged to only be good at one particular subject and are adjudged to be an expert on it based on your degree.

But there are thousands of students who graduate from college and have no idea what they’re good at.

It’s not just me who felt this way. You can read about a plethora of instances of other people who have faced the same conundrum, fresh out of college.

Also, a lot of people will attest to the fact that your education really doesn’t matter but your skills do — “No skill, no kill”

My Story & Learning From Experience By Breaking Out And Trying New Things

So here’s my story. I didn’t graduate college on time with everyone else in my batch. I failed. A bit.

But I learned to grapple with failure from an early age in my teens because of flunking subjects from my very first semester.

Learning to adapt from failure is a critical life skill and your response to failure is as equally important. You have to keep moving forward; and that was lesson number one.

I was in the bottom 30% of my class every semester. However, I was in the top 5% in English, Physics(especially quantum physics) and one particular grade point for something called a “seminar” colloquially by the professors, in what should have been my final semester.

The seminar, was where we could choose any topic of engineering we liked and present it to the class and the teacher. This was 2011 and I chose my topic as “Wireless Electricity”. Yes, in 2011.

I researched Tesla’s original ideas, I was absolutely gripped by them and I did a deep dive into it.

I’ve covered my presentation in an older article called: From Nikola Tesla To The 21st Century: How Wireless Electricity Is The Future Of How We Use Power.

I got a A+ grade on that particular grading. And I eventually graduated with a 5.68 GPA out of 10. Not the worst, I would say.

But it became clear to me as time went on, that I was a bit of a futurist and innovator and thought about things very differently.

All I did in college was play football(soccer), DJ and play music at the most frequented pub in the township(my first part-time job) and watch copious amounts of films and TV shows. Little did I know that they would reveal themselves as my primary passions as I got older.

I was then thrust into work life, without a degree, which I hadn’t got yet because I had to finish my “backlogs”. I had to lie to the recruiters at three companies I worked for by stalling them and telling them that I had graduated and that my degree was on the way and then quitting after a few months. “Jugaad” as we say in India.

They were sales & marketing jobs and I was a terrible salesman. I went door to door on the streets of Mumbai for one company and into posh offices for another company made some cash and then went back to college to finish my degree. But the sales jobs taught me to deal with rejection and failure again and to sell.

I then started my first business at 24, a broking company, and I failed again. But in the process of blowing my savings in that business, I began to learn to write and explore my writing capabilities. I topped my school in English in the ICSE grade X exams securing 90/100 in the subject.

But I ignored that and went off to study engineering because that’s what most of my peers were doing. And in India, parents often have the mindset of pushing their kids to become doctors, engineers or finance experts and often neglect the arts. Or at least it was much more apparent during my youth.

But after enough time, and a lot of introspection and reflection on my life and my interests, I realised that my passions were in music, football, film and writing and my engineering degree would also eventually complement my interests in tech.

Apart from regular writing, I began learning the guitar and piano and learning to produce music on the DAW Logic Pro X. I kept making small gradual periodic improvement; small consistent gradual steps.

After that there was no looking back.

Fast forward to today, and I’m a musician/DJ/producer/film composer, a writer/poet/journalist and film critic, and I’m learning filmmaking and cinematography as well. And I’ve continued my entrepreneurial pursuits and seeing where they lead me.

I had to grapple with a lot of things, especially being interested and inclined to the arts, football and yes, theoretical physics, while being forced to study engineering and programming languages; pursuits that are poles apart but also where I’m subsequently starting to see some congruence(I’ll get to that), like music technology and football data analytics.

Like Steve Job’s suggested in his speech to Stanford students, you have to “connect the dots”.

This is just an example from my life. I was lucky enough to realise what I wanted to really do before forcing myself to fit into a job or role or box that I didn’t fit into.

But my message is more for the collective.

There are so many people who are faced with the same dilemma. They study and graduate in one thing but then find that they’re inclined to other subjects and other fields of interest.

This is rather apparent for the people who are curious and excited by several pursuits in varying industries and fields, who want to pursue something else entirely but don’t because of the constraints they place on themselves.

My advice to you if you feel this way is reiterating with the famous Nike slogan and the new Nike film that’s about to release: “Just do it”

But I would add that — It’s never too late to start doing the things you love and pursuing your topics of interest and subjects that you’re inclined to, just start NOW (and I mean immediately) and you’ll figure things out as time progresses and moves along.

Even if you fail, or don’t follow through, it’s perfectly fine. Failing is the worst that could happen. And it’s really no biggie.

Other Points Of View On The Saying & Emilie Wapnick On The Multipotentialite

According to this Forbes article, being a ‘jack of all trades’ is an essential ingredient for success and lists how it made these particular business owners successful.

Even professional footballers, whose careers last just about 15 years on an average to the max, find it difficult to cope with life after retirement. Which former Chelsea FC players reflect on in this video.

Writer and author Emilie Wapnick calls a “jack of all trades” a “multipotentialite”:

“We are not jack-of-all-trades, we are multipotentialites (in her article on her website Puttylike) and further argues, “What if we called specialists “one trick ponies” rather than experts or masters?”

Although name calling and dishing out tags is counterproductive, it’s something you hear a lot in many different cultures.

As Wapnick suggests,

“For instance, the Korean expression goes, “A man of twelve talents has nothing to eat for dinner.” And the Polish one, “Seven trades, the eighth one — poverty.”

“Yeesh. Such cultural baggage. No wonder so many multipotentialites grow up feeling bad about themselves and have so many fears associated with their plurality.”

Wapnick is the award winning author of the book “How To Be Everything”

And has also delivered this eye-opening TED Talk, linked below:

In her TED Talk, Wapnick outlines three key areas that multipotentialites are experts at:

1. Idea Synthesis
2. Rapid Learning
3. Adaptability

She also explores how multipotentialites are a critical part of society today to solve the emerging problems and challenges we’re faced with in this day and age as we move faster into the future.

She also reveals research that shows that a team comprising a specialist along with a multipotentialite is far more innovative, productive and effective as compared to a team consisting of either category by themselves.

The Final Verdict

As beat poet Jack Kerouac, whose work I stumbled upon while sampling it for some music suggests, ‘The best teacher is experience.”

As far as the “jack of all trades, master of none” line goes, I’d say that, it’s deeply flawed because it’s not mastery in one thing that’s important.

This is life. Not a race. Your life doesn’t depend on just mastering one skill. If you have a lot to offer the world in different ways then by all means do it! Learn different skills, try new things; learning never stops anyway.

Because it’s ok to be where you’re at in any skill. I’ve learnt that it’s ok to make sh*tty art & it’s ok to be a beginner in some things, an intermediate in others and maybe a bit of expert in a few other things. But the point is to keep searching, keep experimenting & trying new things & pursue new skills & try new approaches and new thought processes.

It’s life.

It’s art, writing, football and tech & their intersection for me. It could be some other things or something else for you. Even if the list is extensive.

But what you’re pursuing and offering to the world — It’s yours. It’s your journey. It’s your life. It’s your time.

We’ve also reached an age when remote work is very viable option; I’ve refused to work any role that’s not remote. It’s my time & I don’t want to waste it traveling to and working in an office. No matter what the pay is like. “Life’s too short to sell out” said someone I know.

So yes, if you’re a specialist, then by all means specialize in your area of expertise, but if you’re a multipotentialite and have different interests, ideas, inclinations and curiosities, pursue them all and see where it leads!

Although the origins of this extended sentence to the old saying is unknown, it reads:

“Jack of all trades, master of none,

Though oftentimes better than a master of one.”