About 'Jack of All Trades, Master of None'
Whether you're about one thing or lots of things, both are more than okay.
Growing up, being multi-passionate seemed like a no-no. I heard “Jack of all trades, master of none” a lot. It’s this idea that by being interested, knowledgeable and talented in several things, you weren’t (and couldn’t be) an expert in one.
An early reader, I read whatever was around soaking up knowledge and stories, not all of it ‘age appropriate’. I loved art, crafts, dancing, computer programming — all sorts! Passionate about learning and experimenting without the topic becoming my vocation, my attitude frustrated grown-ups, especially my parents. I can see it made it difficult to peg me to a particular job or profession and how I sometimes appeared noncommittal.
Even though doing something on the side was rife and often necessary with adults, having one job, even one income for the house, signalled status. My grandparents came to England in the early 1950s to forge a life, working multiple jobs to survive. It was part of Afro-Caribbean culture here. In Ireland, where I grew up, doing ‘nixers’ (what today we call ‘side hustles’) was also part of the culture. So I get it. Your kid only needing to do one job with their one interest was regarded as a sign of advancement.
Like how many humans have a complex relationship with money because of messages we internalised during childhood (e.g. “Money doesn’t grow on trees”), plenty of us learned to feel ashamed about having more than one interest or passion.
We learned we were too flighty, scattered, not disciplined enough, squandering our potential, and not taking the business of what we wanted to be when we were grown-ups seriously enough. We believed we lacked brilliance at anything - not true.
Being told you’re a “Jack of all trades, master of none” or that you need to avoid it at all costs can haunt your decisions.
When things go awry, you blame your inability to knuckle down and claim you’re “not a finisher”. When you don’t feel fired up by doing what’s supposed to be the expected thing, your multi-interest ways seem like a big-ass flaw and inconvenience.
Maybe you throw yourself into one thing and refuse to entertain any other interests and passions for fear of ‘derailing’ yourself. You might feel as if one-thing loved ones don’t take you seriously or that you’re only credible if you’re not multi-passionate.
If you lose interest in something after a while, you might blame commitment and ambition issues. Or, if you discover a new interest or passion, you might assume it means something negative about your other interests, even feeling like you’re cheating on or abandoning them.
When unsure of what to do next, you curse yourself for never having nailed your niche. You effectively criticise yourself in the ways you internalised from others.
There can also be this paranoia, insecurity, that if you’d devoted yourself completely to one thing over all the others, shazam! All problems solved and your life would be so different.
I have a great deal of respect and admiration for people who are only about one thing, who’ve always known exactly what they’re here to do and have cracked on, pursuing their one thing with dogged zest; it’s just not who I am.
I’ve wanted it to be because I think sometimes it’s easy to see the solution to certain problems as ‘Just do one thing’, plus I felt ashamed of my apparently scattered ways. Also, one-thing people aren’t free of problems.
Like anything, there’s light and shade. So being about one thing can make you super focused and make it easy to orient towards your goals, but it might also feel really intense and restrictive at times and like everything rides on this one thing. Similarly, being multi-passionate might fire you up and feed various areas of your life, but it can also feel overwhelming and confusing when you haven’t figured out how to harness your nature and recognise what genuinely pulls you and what’s fleeting interest.
Whether you’re only about one thing or you have multiple interests and passions, do your thing. Neither way is an indictment of your worthiness, intelligence or desirability. Each offers the opportunity to be creative, purposeful and fulfilled (or frustrated), just in different ways.
I’d also argue that there are plenty of one-thing people who actually have other interests and passions. There are also plenty of multi-passionate people who have a core theme, thread, that runs through everything they do. What appear to be disparate and unrelated interests and passions feed each other.
If you shut off aspects of yourself based on outdated and negative messaging, you judge yourself, your decisions and outcomes unfairly and you don’t get to flourish. Whatever you’re interested in, you’ll always need to be willing to listen to yourself so you can know yourself more.
**Paid subscribers, I’ve included a video (plus audio version) of a masterclass, Get Out of Your Way: Managing Your Inner Critic and Self-Sabotage below.
I’m about halfway through Netflix’s Baby Reindeer and, jay-sus, the recovering people pleaser in me is wincing and sometimes covering my eyes in recognition of how we can become ensnared in our niceness, over-empathy, and other people’s boundary busting. So good!
Other things I get up to
Latest book is The Joy of Saying No (Harper Horizon). My other books are Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl, The No Contact Rule, The Dreamer and the Fantasy Relationship, and Love, Care, Trust and Respect, all available from my shop.
Did you know you can work with me privately?
My next Relationship Fundamentals class, Are They The Right One for You? The Compatibility Factor, becomes available May 7th. Note, if you’re a paid subscriber, you get access to two of the six classes in the series.