Jack of All Trades, Master of One

By: Tara Levine, Associate Business Consultant

My mentor once told me that a trait of a good manager is the ability to make decisions when others won’t. If that’s true, then I am the world’s worst personal manager.

See, I am more than happy to make a decision surrounding other people. Still, for myself, I am that person that has to read and evaluate every choice and opportunity, even if it’s as simple as what to eat at a restaurant.

Now, eventually, you have to make decisions in life, and I’ve often been told that you have to choose one thing to focus on, especially when it comes to your career. I managed to push off the decision of what degree I was pursuing into my final year of school, managing to max out the ability to double count credits because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to pursue full time.

Likewise, in rugby, I worked through 8+ different positions over five years. And for my musically inclined folks out there, I had to be that person that could switch voice parts-I trained to be a soprano 2 when I was clearly an alto two just so I had options (and yes, I also didn’t want to have to stay on one note for ages).

Maybe I have a commitment issue, you might be wondering, or just a general inability to decide on anything, or perhaps I’m just an overthinker. To the last one, absolutely correct, but for the others-the jury’s still out.

However, the more flattering version is this jack of all trades, utility player, theatre swing kind of deal. It’s not that I can’t master different things, it’s that I intentionally choose not to. Deciding what you want to do in life isn’t an easy decision, and there is no reason to rush it. Instead, I’d learn as much as I can from as many people as possible, not limiting myself to one area.

Don’t get me wrong-specialists are hugely important, especially when it comes to something like the medical field, where you deal with these impossibly small categories of impacted patients and highly targeted therapies. We need specialists to dive in deeper to solve these complex problems, and they are extremely good at their job. But to get to a specialist? You most likely went to your general practitioner first. They’re able to skim over you holistically and understand where you need to go to get more targeted help. And sometimes it’s more than one area.

We need that broader context to anchor us in place and give us guardrails to pursue deeper understanding and solutions without spiraling into the vast abyss of learning. And when we try to jump in without knowledge of depth or resources available or even how far someone else has already gone, we lose our tether to holistic impact. Generalists enable specialists to do their jobs and focus on what they love without compromising the larger goal. For doctors, helping their patients at a multitude of levels based on their symptoms.

For me, it means that I can enable discussion with a wide variety of individuals and foster collaboration with more nuanced points of view. When I walk into a client meeting, I can first focus on their business issues to understand why they may want to dig into a particular area and then help them solve it for their daily and long-term goals.

As an Associate Business Consultant, this is my day-to-day, mapping customers’ processes from start to finish before beginning to reduce their bottlenecks. If I only know the pain points, I will never understand the full scope of its downstream impact on the customers’ workflow, nor can I see if something upstream is causing the severity of the issue. There’s a cumulation of my varied skill set here, an option to excel in not just one area, but many, based on these different mixes of process and pain points and how to best leverage what little I know to make people’s lives easier.

At the end of the day, everyone has their strengths, even if they cannot be put into a neat little box. And when people are shoving you into a box, it’s okay not to fit, and it’s even better to think outside of it. I may be a jack of all trades, but for now, I’m also a master of one: my ability and intentionality to facilitate my own forward progress with as much ambiguity and lack of definition as I please. And who knows what other skills I’ll grow into? That’s for future me to decide.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Veeva.