Long Live The Jack Of All Trades!

One thing that I often hear from people who are giving advice about success is that you need to focus on one thing at a time. By being a master of an art form, you can create marvelous things, but when you are a jack of all trades, you fall short on everything. "A jack of all trades, but a master of none," is how I believe the phrase goes. I have done a lot of consideration about this through the last couple years, and I can both agree and disagree with it. I think there is a value on both side, but one doesn't necessarily trump the other. In fact, I think a happy medium would be more appropriate.

In the book "Think and Grow Rich," there is a segment called "3 feet from gold," which tells a tale about stopping short of a great fortune by three feet. Instead of digging just a couple feet which could have gathered the individual an amazing amount of wealth, he gave up and tried to hedge his loses by selling his equipment and selling the land to another. The person who bought the land from him knew something that the first guy was unaware of about the way that gold flows through the Earth. He knew that it will be scattered in veins of the ground below and that the rock where the first guy had left off was an indication to piles of underground riches shortly beneath them. Sure enough, the person who bought the land at a discount and the equipment for a fraction of the cost, made out like a bandit that should have very well gone to the original owner. That original owner, however, was impatient that day and learned a lesson that stuck with him for the rest of his life... Whenever you think you have tried everything there is to do and have put int the effort you think is necessary, the prize at the end could very well be just three feet away.

This is a good illustration of what is is to be a master and is pretty similar to something that my yoga instructor once told me. He said, that if you always go out and dig a bunch of ten foot holes you might never find anything, but if you take the time to go just another ten feet down, you are more likely to hit oil and do it quicker with less effort than what a bunch of ten foot holes would get you. The main morel is that you need to hone your skills until you are proficient enough to be able to do incredible things, but there is one other element that isn't considered in this example, which is that a baker should never spend his time too invested in digging holes. In fact, the more time he spends digging, the further he gets from discovering that he is meant to bake.

All of us are capable of doing amazing things. I even argue that we are all capable of doing a bunch of great things, but we often get too tied up in the bullshit of life, that we don't invest our time into it. I have done a whole lot of things that didn't do a whole lot for me on the surface level, but what it did do was allowed me to learn skills that cannot be learned with any one skill set; the skill of learning. See, if I practice the piano for my entire life, I could compose music that could bring someone to tears, but if I were to learn every instrument that I could get my hands on as I learned about them, I would develop an incredible respect and deeper understanding for music as a whole that could revolutionize the entire way people view song. Also, as I were to pick up more instruments, my capacity for being able to understand it, would increase and the time it would take for me to pick it up would decrease.

I haven't been learning every instrument that I've ever witness played, but what I have done is kept and open mind to things that I found interesting. I would find a spark of creativity and then learn more about that topic of interest that keeps me up at night thinking about until it became obsession. It may fade as time passed, but what I noticed was how much that "arbitrary" skill seemed to give me an edge when I considered something about me next endeavor. I was able to pull from a data base that my peers or competition would never think about because the would never see the correlations between the two. However, one of the most amazing things about delving into a world of knowledge is that you become entranced by all of the connections everything seemingly has. Things that you would never consider were remotely related are actually connected in a way that allows you to see that which others can't. You may be digging an endless amount of holes that never draw oil, but from a plane, you may have created a new landscape that makes everything around it behave entirely differently. Sometimes, the small things that you pick up along your journey are actually very relevant to your future self.

To make this, perhaps more palatable, think of it this way: At one point in my life I wanted to learn how to draw. I drew like shit and I got a little better, but not much better. Later on, I wanted to make a board game that used a lot of cheeky artwork, so I did my own mediocre illustrations to get me started. I never ended up making that game, but what I did do was talk about it which led me to eventually get in contact with people who helped me actually design a board game. Because I had my own product that I could sell, now I felt confident enough to use that as a lever to get me to start making more serious decisions, like starting an actual LLC. After become legitimate, I started thinking about more ways to make it an official business, so I could feel like it wasn't just a silly hobby. Also, before I wanted to do YouTube videos, but I fell off the face of the Earth in the process. I also was blogging for a while, but that kind of went to the wayside. I also, kinda wanted to learn about nutrition, philosophy, speed reading, speed calculation, music, 3d- modeling, among other things. None of these things were ever the ultimate goal that I had originally planned, but what they did was brought me to the next step that i needed to get to to be able to progress.

Success, honestly is just trying out a bunch of shit until you find out whats best for you. If you aren't meant to be a baker, baking more isn't going to help you out. If you are meant to be a baker, than digging holes isn't going to help you either, but the thing about life is that you don't know what you are meant to do until you find it and you can't find it if you aren't looking. By trying more stuff more often you could get there way quicker. the more you know, the more you are aware of. The more you are aware of, the more discernment you can make about the world around you. The more discernment you can make, the greater amount of influence you have over your reality.

I hope this was insightful. Take care!