... for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bomb

Jack of All Trades, Master of Something

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2024-07-09 14:30:03

... for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

The common thinking about generalists (Johannes factotum, i.e. "John do-it-all" or Jack of all trades) is that they may able to do various things, but they're not very good at any of them. The reason for this seems self-evident: if you have time to learn the basics of many different fields, you don't have time to learn any of their finer nuances.

People use the expression "Jack of all trades, master of none" in a dismissive way, implying that not being specialized in anything is undesirable or embarrassing in some way. Yet generalists are chosen for many important roles in society. When one talks of a "family doctor", they usually mean a general practitioner with some level of understanding of most disciplines of medicine. Many CEOs, managers, and facilitators in business and tech tend to be generalists, too. Clearly society has special spots for these people which it claims are really good at nothing.

At the evolutionary level, "specialist species" are the first to go extinct when the environment has an abrupt shift. The "generalist species" are the adaptable ones, those that can pivot to different diets, different hunting and foraging strategies, and different climates when the need arises. Consider raccoons, cockroaches, and... humans. Whether we realize it or not, we owe our world-bullying success to being natural Jacks of all trades, not specialists.