What I am going to explicate over here are my insights and thoughts about being a great interdisciplinary learner and a person who seeks out experiences and wisdom in Life with spontaneity and curiosity. Perhaps the term “all trades” is misleading, as I don’t profess to be interested in the universal sum of knowledge and skill sets. Rather, I would like to replace the word “all” with “few/many”. The number does not matter, as some people are naturally interested in more stuff and they do it with all the love for live and can manage to excel in many things.
To start off, I would like to introduce the concept of an “adaptor”, which happens to also be called a “Jack” in colloquial terms and have the connotation of being adaptive and spontaneous. Lovely, because that is exactly what a Jack needs to be
I. To be able to plug into different domains of knowledge and bring all the innovations and solutions together as one integrated piece.
II. There is no way one can possibly keep up with the exponential expansion of domain knowledge. Hence, it is wiser to use the networked effect of different domains of knowledge as a leverage. (meaning that the more things you know, the more perspectives, possibilities and potential ideas you have to work with as long as you can draw links between different domains of knowledge. Think of what led to the video game industry? Design + Traditional games + computer advances + businesses)
Hence, my basic aspiration of becoming a great Jack of many trades (specifically Combio, humanism and SE and many of their subsets) has been reduced to the challenge of fulfilling these goes.
How to fulfill the basis
1. I love people. It is as simple as that that follows of my take on Life that there are many many people (perhaps everyone) who are intrinsically special. Learning, talking and doing things with people inspires me. And hence, from the many interesting experiences, paradigms and wisdom that I gain from people, I can begin to build up my understanding of many pools of knowledge in Life, and appreciate the connection between things. Like how an apple may mean food, a business opportunity, red color, an alphabet aid at the same time.
2. Read as widely and ask as many interesting questions as possible, so I get to learn more.
3. Continuously strive to be inspired. When one area does not seem as exciting to me, I would either find new perspective or I would often skip on to other domains that are “happening”, it helps to be along with exciting people moving onto the next big thing.
4. Reflect and think. Learning so much without thinking through, reflecting, asking myself questions forming frameworks and explaining to others is kind of a deflated way of learning. The best way to learn is to teach others and to apply what I have learned directly though action. Clarity helps.
5. Being an expansive thinker – I am not sure whether this could be acquired or taught, but I am acutely aware that my brain is abuzz in a playground of ideas and get easily fired up by ideas, relating ideas seems to be intuitive in that sense. Perhaps exploring Life and thinking things through via first principles instead of textbook answers and theories might help. Talking to people and seeing what they see helps. Is this creativity?
6. Basically, I am not that smart. But I just ask good questions and I think that can get me somewhere.
What not to do
1. To be distracted like a dog by cats or squirrels. One can easily be caught up and overwhelmed by the number of books to read and things to learn. However, always question, is it useful? Is it fun? Is it meaningful? Could it lead to something? If the answer is no to all, perhaps you might wasting your time and energy… One can only do that much. More importantly thing leverage from synergistic domains of knowledge and skill sets.
2. With that much learning and doing, being a great Jack of all trade requires rather high maintenance.
The Value
1. To be able to leverage on the network of ideas, knowledge and people. Hence solutions tend to be have an integrated approach and is leveraged by the synergy of different fields.
2. Project management this together with the ability to appreciate interpersonal team dynamics, team capacity and skill sets allows me to take my team further. It allows me to serve as a conduit for ideas.
3. This toolkit will get upgraded by being polished by other people’s experience and insights. Which means that I learn faster with more knowledge gain. (=
4. Adaptiveness – allows me to survive and excel.
5. I believe that everyone good enough ought to be crossed-trained.
2 comments:
I see myself as a jack too, and agree with most of what you've said, but I do not see the value of Jack of all trades as highly as you.
The irony of being a jack of all trade is as you've stated. You cannot be easily distracted. However, I feel that the reason that most jacks are well... jacks is because they are easily distracted. Not necessary in a bad sense, but that they like to learn and dabble in anything new and different. That is a jack's asset and a jack's TERRIBLE Achilles' heel.
Yes, it is good to be crossed-trained, it gives you perspective, ideas not available to those who are trained in one single disciplined. But who says someone who is good at one field can't be cross-trained?
And of course, there is that issue of your self-esteem and confidence. You need to have confidence in yourself in order to manage people who are much more accomplished than you in their various fields. While you spend X time learning a little of everything, they spend the same time and are far ahead of you in their field. Where is your confidence going to come from?
Being a good project manager is probably the closest thing to being a good "jack", but when you're really good at that, that is your area of mastery, and you're no longer a jack anymore.
I'm not as optimistic as you about us, jacks. Focus, clarity is hard to go hand in hand with being jacks. Like Prof Ben has said, and as many of the successful people has said, its more important to find what you're good at and get damn good at it.
Yup, thats what I think.
As Jon says, I've already said it before. The successful people that I've come across are typically damn good at least one, sometimes two or three things. They also typically have a couple of strong complementary competencies.
Personally, I haven't quite come across any successful jacks. Sorry bud. Then again, maybe you can be the first.
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