Journal

In Defence of Being a Jack of All Trades

When I was fourteen or fifteen I read a magazine article, probably in Cosmopolitan, about finding your signature scent. The advice was to choose one perfume and wear it for the rest of your life. French women did this, apparently, and French women were elegant and grown up and had everything sorted.

I took it to heart. I’m very glad I never followed through. This was the 1980s, the age of Obsession and Poison and big hair. Wear one of those every day for decades, stop being able to smell it on yourself, keep adding more, and eventually people on the Tube will start fainting at your feet.

It was a small thing, but it’s the first time I remember being told that the grown-up way to live was to pick one thing, claim it and stick to it.

Not a sticker

The same idea came back when my friends and I were starting work. Some people had a clear route, into medicine say, and that was them set. Plenty of others tried a job for six months, then another.

They were criticised for it, mostly by parents. “Fourth job in two years. You can tell she’s not a sticker.”

A sensible society would tell a 23-year-old to sample. You’ve no idea whether you like an office or working alone, a team or the general public, until you try. I’d say the first ten years of working life are better spent experimenting than sticking.

Decision fatigue

When I left my job to set up a cut flower business, I read a lot of business books. At the time they were mostly written by American men, and they held up the dotcom entrepreneur who automated everything outside work. Same clothes every day, same food, same gym routine, so no energy was wasted on decisions.

I had two small children and a husband working as a GP, nights included, so the domestic side sat heavily on me. My days were already decision after decision. I wasn’t remotely living in the same world as these people, and yet I read the advice!.

The things I make

The last place it shows up is the one that matters most, and it’s about making.

For the past ten years I’ve taught online, often things I’m not especially expert at. I can teach them well, though. People who have recently learned something still remember where they got stuck, and that makes them good teachers.

But it has always run up against that phrase. I like doing lots of different things, so I must be the “jack of all trades, master of none”.

Seeing everything on our phones has sharpened this. Before, if you wanted to see exquisite needlework, bookbinding or carved spoons, you went to a museum or an exhibition. The setting told you these were made by people who had given their lives to them. Now the same work appears on a screen with nothing to mark it out. So we look at our own wonkily carved spoon and decide we’ve failed, when all we have done is have a go.

What the specialist says no to

When we admire someone who has carved spoons or worked goldwork embroidery for thirty years, we rarely think about what they said no to. Perhaps they didn’t take up knitting, or make a garden, or learn to make pasta. Doing one thing exclusively always means not doing others.

Going broad means saying no to that depth instead. Neither is better. It may be personality, or it may be luck in finding the one thing that holds you for a lifetime.

“Jack” was the bottom of the skill ladder. “Master” is guild language, the person skilled enough to be recognised as a master of their trade. By that measure I’m a jack in plenty of things, and it suits me. I love the curiosity, and I love trying things out.

So if that’s how you’re made, be a Jack or a Jill without apology, and stop measuring your work against what scrolls past on your phone.

And never get a signature scent. What suited you at fifteen won’t suit you at thirty, or sixty, or eighty. If that’s true of perfume, it may well be true of other things.

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