Master or Jack of all trades? How to manage your skill-set portfolio

Some assert that a “Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” Others insist on the ideal focusing on and achieving virtuosity in a single craft, free from distraction and futile pursuits that will never lead you to mastery. After all, there is no point in wasting effort on skills in which you will never excel - never to wield effortlessly. Amateurism, it seems, only takes away focus from your main specialty.

So which is it? What is ideal - a specialist or a Jack of all trades? The answer is both and neither. What is ideal for you is defined by your special circumstances, your values, your identity, and your purpose that emerges from them.

You have a choice whether to commit to one discipline - and be the best you can be in it - or to distribute your time and energy across multiple disciplines knowing you’ll achieve mastery in none. Your choices are either specialty or well-roundedness - or inadeptness. The decision you make will prove wrong only if your personal values and identity, and the aspirations derived from them, are not in line with your chosen path. Even choosing incompetence can be the right choice for you if that is congruent with your value system. And that’s fine.

In a world of rapidly narrowing specialisation, being a specialist doesn’t carry much awe anymore. Almost everyone’s a specialist now in his own little tiny category, so specialty loses its gravitas.

This is the case for the well-rounded skill-set over the deep focus in just one skill:

I failed to reach mastery in what I initially intended, due to life circumstance combined with really bad choices. I could be rationalising, but there’s no denying that there’s an apparent advantage to being OK in several skills compared to being a master in only one. This is because of the law of diminishing returns.

The law of diminishing returns applies to physiology, economics, relationships, and pretty-much every other aspect of life; the more you invest in something, the less the profit you make from your additional effort. The axiom “no pain no gain” is generally true, but the more pain you put into it, the lesser your marginal gain. This means that your initial results are easy, but you need to put in way more effort for additional results. Diminishing returns is partly why we have the demonstrably verifiable Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule.

The effort you put into mastering one discipline can yield multiplied results if you distribute it. Let’s say you give roughly 20% of your available effort to get roughly 80% of dexterity in a given skill - 100% is the highest achievable mastery. But you need your extra 80% of effort to get that last available 20% of dexterity. Alternatively, you could distribute your effort and limited resources across five disciplines, investing 20% of effort to achieve 5x80% of results - roughly speaking. This means that the cumulative value of your imperfect dexterity in several disciplines is far greater than that of perfect dexterity in one.

At least in health and fitness, well-roundedness is ostensibly a better strategy (unless your goal is sport competition, in which case, health goes out the window for you). For example, if you give your full effort into being the best bodybuilder you can be, you will suck at stamina, speed, agility, mobility, explosiveness, and endurance (not the same as stamina). Instead, why not distribute your effort across multiple physiological stimuli and responses for greater overall health and performance benefits?

Marketing is just like any other investment. Each marketing campaign is expected to yield returns higher than what that same investment could have brought otherwise. It is important to consider that, ceteris paribus, the rate of profit from an investment tends to decrease as you increase the investment. Especially in digital marketing where you can more-accurately forecast and predict marketing returns, it is common practice to seek the optimal marketing budget (investment) for a given campaign. This is the point at which the rate of return is at its highest. Anything higher than that would still bring revenue, but at such high cost that it becomes unprofitable - at least relative to its opportunity cost. Even if you do make some profit beyond the optimal investment, it is at such a low rate return, that it isn’t worth it. The same budget could be invested somewhere else with a higher return on investment.

Marketing budget planning

This is to show that beyond a certain point it is uneconomical to keep investing in the same thing. It is why investors diversity their portfolio. An ideal strategy is to invest an ideal amount in each investment, and not more. This is the strongest argument for the Jack-of-all-trades strategy.

Still, we need the specialists - the undeniable authorities in their field. They define their discipline, and they even contribute to its progression. And society rewards specialists with respect, recognition, and resources.

We need both specialists and Jacks of all trades. Both roles are needed in team efforts. A team needs its masters in their discipline but also the well-rounded Jacks of all trades taking the role of integrator, decision maker, visionary, innovator, communicator, even leader. Both can be pioneers - a master can pioneer his craft, and a Jack can bring several crafts together to pioneer a robust solution.

There are risks to both strategies. You may fully commit to one discipline and still fail to achieve virtuosity relative to your competitors, either due to life circumstance or genetic predisposition. Also, your skill could be replaced by automation or prohibited by the state. This makes your total investment in one basket quite risky. Then again, a Jack of all trades may distribute his eggs in several baskets, but that also increases the risk of at least one of them turning out to be a total waste of time. He also runs the risk of never finding a meaningful role in society, since his unique blend of skills is overly specific, narrow and niche.

A master of a trade is not necessarily better than a Jack of all trades, and vice versa. Being a specialist does carry recognition, but only in that narrow field. A Jack does not carry recognition as a specialist, but he may carry some recognition in several fields. Both masters and Jacks are needed in teams and communities. One or the other may be more suitable for you depending on your personal value system.

Which one speaks to you? Does your self-image portray a master in 1-2 disciplines at the most - and being clueless in everything else? Or do you see yourself as having a well-rounded skill-set, good-enough in many things, but not fully committed to anything? Do you even see yourself as being fine with no skill whatsoever, and thus enjoy leisure and minimalism instead? That’s fine too, because that means you have less to lose.

Bottom line: Do you want to be the best in one area and suck at the rest, or do you want the be good-enough in more-or-less everything? The right choice for you is in you.

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