“Jack of all trades, master of none.” (The insult was bolted on later.)
You’ve heard it your whole life as a warning: don’t spread thin, pick a lane, go deep or go home.
For its first century the phrase ran bare: “a jack of all trades”, a useful person who could turn a hand to anything. Though never quite an admiring one: Geffray Mynshul’s 1618 printing files him next to the pander, the broker and the hangman.
The “master of none” got stapled on in 1741, in a Dublin pamphlet by Charles Lucas. The line went from a slight to a fence. And the first recorded sneer at a jack-of-all-trades was aimed at Shakespeare.
A pamphlet warned London’s playwrights about an upstart “Johannes factotum” (a do-everything) who fancied himself “the only Shake-scene in a country.” An actor who presumed to write… imagine the audacity.
Funny how the insult’s first recorded target is the best argument it ever got.
Now ask who benefits from the fence…
A specialist is a beautiful thing to an institution: legible, hireable, slottable into a box on an org chart, and replaceable, because the box outlives the person in it. Deep-and-narrow is the shape that fits a system built out of interchangeable parts.
“Find your niche” turns out to be excellent advice, mostly for the people who own the niche.
The generalist is the opposite kind of trouble. He doesn’t fit a box. You can’t write his job description, can’t benchmark him, can’t swap him for the next identical résumé, because the value lives in the wiring between his skills, not in any one of them (and the wiring appears nowhere on the chart).
From inside an institution that illegibility reads as a flaw. From the outside, it’s the entire asset.
Because the thing a system can’t classify is also the thing it can’t fully own.
The specialist rents his usefulness to whoever owns the box. The generalist, messy and unclassifiable, keeps the one thing no org chart can carry: himself.
For the record: I didn’t refuse the lane. I took two – localization first, then copywriting – and drove each to the end of the road. The specialization ran out before the curiosity did. What reads from the org chart as a failure to commit was, from the inside, a series of completed commitments.
With a catch: the wiring between skills pays nothing until you point it at a domain that prices it.
For me that’s markets, where being several things at once is the entire game.
There’s a fine line between unapplied and “polymath”, though. And it’s a two-edged sword – a mind that won’t stop asking “why?” and “why not?” has no natural brake, and somewhere past the 27th open tab, learning stops being fuel and becomes productivity theatre.
Still, I declined to be made legible, and I’m sure that choice has an invoice… opportunities that went, quietly, to people easier to file.
Rebellions this comfortable aren’t usually free.
I just haven’t caught the bill arriving yet.
Catch me if you can?
Related: The Mosaic Mind – the original, longer take.
Sources: Lucas, Pharmacomastix, 1741 · Mynshul, 1618 · Folger on Groatsworth
"The specialization ran out before the curiosity did” is painfully relatable. Although I’d argue the real dividing line between polymath and productivity theatre is somewhere around tab #27. I’m currently at #43, so I’m choosing to believe I’m onto something.