Why I Love Being a
Jack of All Trades

February 6, 2024 - Published

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like recently there's a weird stigma around being a jack of all trades, like if you don't put your whole life into something, then it's not worth doing. People get really hung up on the "master of none" part of "jack of all trades, master of none," and I feel like that does a huge disservice to what it MEANS to be a jack of all trades.

First of all, as a comparison, do you actually want to master something? There's a commonly spoken rule of thumb that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, and while it's a debated statistic, we can use it as a rough rule of thumb since people argue for both a higher and lower count, depending on the subject. Whatever project or hobby you currently have: do you actually want to spend that much time doing just one thing? It's perfectly fine if you do, but considering how rare masters are, I sincerely doubt that mastering something is what most people want to do. If you want to learn a language, for example, I think most people would be perfectly content with being conversational in the language (being able to speak with and understand other people in that language), rather than fluent (speaking and listening on the same level as someone who was born into that language).

With that in mind, how long do you think would be a good amount of time to become "conversational" at something? 5,000 hours? 1,000 hours? There's no rule of thumb for this online since it varies even for languages, but I want to present a slightly different idea. That is: wouldn't it be SICK to say you have 100 hours in something? I don't have any friends who can say they put even 5 hours (let alone 10 or 20) into learning Esperanto, a man-made language that has tens of thousands of speakers. I have few friends that can say they put 100 hours into practicing animation, or 100 hours into video editing, or 100 hours into crochet. However, I can say I did all of those things, because instead of focusing on mastering things, I focus on doing what I enjoy doing. That's something that I think is really powerful, but not enough people realize!

An important difference between 10,000 hours and 100 hours is that 100 hours is way easier to achieve. If you dedicate only a single hour a day to an activity, you could get 100 hours in 3 different activities within a year. While 100 is very small compared to 10,000, it's also a lot more than 0! If you spend 100 hours in a video editing program, you'll know more than enough to reliably edit basic videos together. If you spend 100 hours in crochet, you should be able to do multiple different stitches from muscle memory alone. That would easily place yourself above the abilities of most people.

With this in mind, you end up with a lot of notable outcomes: 1) you'll know about many more subjects than the hypothetical person that sticks to a single activity for 10,000 hours, 2) if you stop enjoying one activity, you can easily switch over to something else that you already have experience in, and crucially, 3) becoming a jack of all trades doesn't stop you from mastering anything. Hypothetically, sure, if you spend 3,000 hours in one thing,  3,000 hours in another thing, and 3,000 hours in a third thing, then none of them would be at the master-level according to our example statistic. However, that even distribution is pretty unlikely in practice since you'll most likely find yourself gravitating towards what interests you most. If you have one hobby that's at 9,000 hours because your other 1,000 hours are split between 5 different hobbies, your skill level in that one thing will NOT be that far off from someone with 10,000 hours (from what I've seen, improvement at the highest level of any activity tends to taper off since there's less things to improve at). Also, even if the distribution was perfectly even, 3,000 hours in something is still pretty flippin' good!!! 

Of course, this usage of hours is ignoring several things including the fact that you can find ways to learn more efficiently, especially if you have practice in learning multiple things, but I'm just using it as an arbitrary measurement so you understand what I'm getting at. We all have to find ways to divide up our time, but if you have a bit of free time lying around and a hobby you've always been itching to start, go for it! You don't need to be a master to be good at something, and you don't need to be good at something to enjoy it.

From my experience, having multiple hobbies also allows you to figure out how to learn things faster (learning in itself can be considered a skill), and you'd be surprised at how skills are transferable between seemingly unrelated subjects.

• Vecderg