There are few things that American society rewards more than singular greatness. If you’re one of the few dozen greatest athletes in a popular sport, you can make $20 million a year or more. Same goes for the top actors and actresses in Hollywood. Those are more dramatic examples, but many fields are top-heavy, in which someone with a generational jump shot earns exponentially more than the masses below them.
As I see it, there are a couple structural problems with this system. One is that we often mistake a person’s greatness at one task (like throwing footballs) with a propensity for greatness at any task (game show host, Senator). The other problem is that the overwhelming majority of us are not among the very greatest in the world at a single, marketable skill. There isn’t the same market for generalists.
This is perfectly encapsulated by our common misunderstanding and mis-contextualization of a famous quotation. We probably all know the saying, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” This seems to suggest that devotion to one skill is better; that a scattershot approach to acquiring lots of skills leaves one without proficiency in any of them. But that’s not even the entire sentence, pulled from Robert Greene’s 1592 booklet Green’s Groats-Worth of Wit (which appears to have been a 16th-century shit-talking manual, but that’s a story for another time). The rest, crucially, is: “but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Capitalism’s reward system aside, it’s far more practically useful to be good at a wide range of things than to be great at a single thing. Read correctly in its full context, this is clearly what the actual idiom is saying. The more time you spend myopically honing a narrow set of skills, the less time you spend communicating with others, or reading, or cooking, or traveling, or spending time in nature, or otherwise becoming a more complete human. There are certainly well-rounded celebrities and athletes; there are also a great many deeply developmentally stunted, borderline sociopaths out there.
Over time, I’ve realized that my greatest strength has always been that I’m pretty good at just about everything. Need an extra player for your rec sports team? I’m coordinated and fit enough to step in and not embarrass you or myself in just about any sport (volleyball being a notable exclusion). Need another set of hands in the kitchen, or to figure out how to take what you’ve got in the fridge and turn it into something not just passable, but that you’d happily make again? I’ve been cooking for 20 years and am constantly trying new ways of churning out good food.
I can’t offer you a Masterclass for one thing you’ve always wanted to learn. But I can help with the seemingly never-ending list of everyday skills that contribute to a balanced, fulfilling life. I have lots of ideas of things I want to do in this space, but I also want to hear from you. Some topics will be based on my own experience, while others will involve me interviewing experts or others with the proficiency I lack in that particular domain.
This should go without saying, but I’m far from perfect, and failure is also absolutely part of the expectation here. I’d love to explore things you or I have failed to do in the past and see if we can workshop a better way. Because, chances are, you are also a generalist, and not Steph Curry (though if you are Steph Curry, hello, please also subscribe).
This was an idea I’d been spinning around in my head already for quite a while and one that I’d already committed myself to launching for 2023, but I figured now was a good time to plant the flag and get the word out. In the meantime, you can also read more of my writing here.
I’m still deciding how frequently I’ll be posting and whether there will be extra content for paid subscribers, but everything is free for now. So sign up, tell your friends and family, and be on the lookout in the new year for something you can feel pretty good about.