The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep. 19: The Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades

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Starting point is 00:00:49 the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Well, hello there, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an in-between episode, which is a very short audio essay intended to give you perhaps some philosophical tidbits, something to chew on, to mull over this weekend, or perhaps the week coming up. It will be very short, probably less than 15 minutes, and it is to spread out some of the longer one-and-a-half to two-hour episodes that I usually do with other guests. And you can find all episodes of the Tim Ferriss show at fourhourworkweek.com spelled out fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. If you like the show or to support the show,

Starting point is 00:01:35 please visit the Tim Ferriss book club. That's at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash books, where you can find books that have completely changed my life, hugely impacted my life. I choose roughly one per month and I think there are four or five up right now. That's at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash books. Today's essay is about this term, Jack of all trades. And it is based on some writing I'd done quite a while back that I've revised and added to. And the title is, The Top Five Reasons to be a Jack of All Trades. The Top Five Reasons to be a Jack of All Trades. And we're going to begin with a quote. And it is as follows.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Quote, A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone. I'm going a building write a sonnet balance accounts build a wall set a bone i'm going to speed up a little bit here comfort the dying take orders give orders cooperate act alone solve equations analyze a new problem pitch manure program a computer still working on that one cook a tasty meal fight efficiently die gallantly specialization is for insects and that is a quote by robert a Heinlein, considered the dean of science fiction writing, and the author of a book called Stranger in a Strange Land, one of my favorites. But the

Starting point is 00:02:54 point here is that specialization is for insects. But you might say to yourself, the days of Da Vinci are long gone, totally dead. It is no longer possible to be, say, a world-class painter, engineer, scientist, or more. You know, those times are long gone. Nothing was discovered back then. These days, in rapidly evolving technological times, the best you can really do is pick your field and master it. Now, that can result in lots of income. But the flip side of that is the collection of benefits and virtues of being a generalist, which is what we're going to discuss. So the devout

Starting point is 00:03:36 specialist might label the impetuous learner, and you could count certainly Da Vinci and Ben Franklin, among those jack of all trades, master of none. And so the chorus would say, in this modern world, it is he who specializes, who survives and thrives. There's no place for Renaissance men or women. Those are just starry-eyed amateurs who think they're going to be the next Amadeus or whatever, or Mozart, as it were. And they're just disillusioned.

Starting point is 00:04:04 There are billions and billions of people on this planet, you need to specialize. Now, the question is, is this true? And I do not think so. Based on all of my experiments, based on all of my research, all of my interviews, I don't agree with that statement, or at least the artificial pairing of jack of all trades, master of none. And here are the top five reasons why being a jack of all trades, or what I prefer to call a generalist, is making a comeback. And if you hear some noise in the background, I'm sitting on the edge of a cornfield. And there's agricultural equipment and all sorts of stuff around.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Reason number five. All right, we're going in descending order here. Jack of all trades, master of none is an artificial pairing. You can also call it a false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to be a jack of all trades, master of many. How is this possible? Specialists tend to overestimate the time needed to, quote, master a skill and confuse mastering a skill with perfecting a skill. And I've written about this extensively in The 4-Hour Chef, which is actually a book about learning, so that might

Starting point is 00:05:10 be considered a titling error, but generalists recognize that the 80-20 principle applies to skills. For instance, 20% of language's vocabulary will enable you to communicate and understand at least 80% of the time. 20% of a dance like tango, let's just say lead and footwork, separates the novice from the pro. You could also look at, say, 20% of the moves in a sport, accounting for 80% of the scoring, etc., etc., etc. Is this settling for mediocre? If you take a surgical approach to applying the 80-20 principle,

Starting point is 00:05:42 I would argue not at all. Generalists take the condensed study up to but not beyond the point of rapidly diminishing returns, okay? And you can be world class, I think, in anything in 6 to 12 months, meaning 5% in the top 5% in the general population. And people cite the 10,000 hour rule, which was in many ways a sort of vast oversimplification of research by a guy named Anders and a few others. And that has largely been, I think, discredited. You can look at deliberate practice, but there are just too many factors at play here. And correlation does not equal causation if you look at that data set.

Starting point is 00:06:22 And certainly, if someone wants to get to say speaking Spanish fluently, or even Chinese or Japanese, it can be done in eight to 12 weeks. I've seen it done, I've done it myself, even as someone who thought himself to be bad at languages as a kid. All right, so coming back to the main point, generalists take the condensed study up to but not beyond the point of rapidly diminishing returns. So there's perhaps a 5% comprehension difference between the focused generalist who studies Japanese systematically for, say, two years versus the specialist who studies Japanese for 10 years. With the lack of urgency, this is really important, with the lack of urgency typical of those who

Starting point is 00:07:02 claim that something, quote, takes a lifetime to learn, end quote. Bullshit, that's hogwash. Hogwash, what a word. Based on all of, again, the experiments I've done throughout all of the books, the hundreds of people I've interviewed, it is possible to become world-class in almost any skill within one year, meaning top 5% in the general population and sometimes well beyond that. All right. So reason number five, again, jack of all trades, master of none is an artificial

Starting point is 00:07:33 pairing. It sounds good. It's repeated so often we believe it to be true. It's kind of like a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. But guess what? That's sometimes true. It's not always true, right? You could run probabilities and stats on, let's just say, a bird in the hand that's worth $10 and then two in the bush that could be worth $10 million. And if there's a 50% probability that you could do that based on A, B, C, D, and E, it doesn't always hold true. That's the point, right? It's a very memorable expression, but it's artificial. Okay, number four. In a world of dogmatic specialists, it's often the generalist who ends up running the show. This is very, very true. So ask yourself, is the CEO of a given company a better accountant than the CFO or the CPA? You know, was Steve Jobs a better programmer than

Starting point is 00:08:24 top coders at Apple? No, of course not. But he had a broad range of skills and saw the unseen interconnectedness. As technology becomes a commodity with the democratization of information and decreasing costs in hardware and software development alike,

Starting point is 00:08:42 it's oftentimes, not always, but the big picture generalists who can predict, innovate, and rise to power the fastest. There is a reason military generalists are called such. And we'll come back to this point, but it's very important. It doesn't mean that the leaders in, say, a tech company don't have tech chops. It doesn't mean that leaders in a sales organization didn't formally develop a very high level of competency in building out sales organizations. But at the highest levels, you need certain, what you might consider soft skills, or connective tissue, like communication and otherwise, to be able to thread everything together to be a proper leader.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And we'll come back to this. Reason number three, boredom is failure. Okay, boredom is failure. And I've written about this in the four hour work week where I said that you should replace striving for success in nebulous terms with striving for excitement, right? And that the opposite of happiness is not sadness, but in fact, it is boredom. And if you want more on that, you can read the relevant chapters. But reason number three, why you should be a jack of all trades, or at least many trades, boredom is failure. In a first world economy, we have all of the physical necessities covered with even low class income, right? You have shelter, you have food, you have water, etc. Subsequently, Maslow's hierarchy of needs drives us to need more for any measure of

Starting point is 00:10:14 comparative success. And again, in quotation marks, so we get pushed up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to intellectual pursuits, to these intangibles that aren't as easy to satisfy as just draping a blanket over someone's shoulders. And in such a case, lack of intellectual stimulation, not superlative material wealth beyond a certain point, is what drives us to depression and emotional bankruptcy. Generalizing and experimenting prevents this while over-specialization nearly guarantees it. And if you look really closely at some of the best specialists, let's just say programmers, those I

Starting point is 00:10:56 know, they have extremely well-developed outside interests. Not always, but the people who have the longest staying power, the people who end up being co-founders of humongous companies, don't have their identity purely vested in one skill set. Okay, so boredom is failure. Number two, consequently, or not consequently, I should say coincidentally, programmers and music, really interesting combo at the higher levels. I see it combined a lot. Anyway, you techies can debate that one or disprove it. Boredom is failure. Number two, reason number two, we're getting close to the top here. Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence instead of fear. All right. And at the

Starting point is 00:11:40 end of the day, your subjective well-being, your contentedness is going to be very closely related to how much you embrace confidence and exude confidence, experience confidence, instead of fear. This diversity of intellectual playgrounds also breeds empathy with the broadest range of human conditions and appreciation of the broadest range of human accomplishments. The alternative is, on the extreme side, the defensive xenophobia and smugness, a lot of smugness, uniquely common to those whose identities are defined by their job title or single skill. And oftentimes these folks are also at past a certain point pursuing this incremental gain out of obligation and not enjoyment. And, you know, most recently, I had an extended debate with an engineer, a very good engineer,

Starting point is 00:12:32 about something related to open source. It's a very, very long story. And I'm an advisor to Automatic. I'm very familiar with, say, WordPress as it exists as.org and then.com. But because this gentleman's entire self-worth was wrapped up in one skill set, one perspective from which he could argue, he was more concerned with being right than with getting results. He couldn't move on until he'd been proven right in his sphere of expertise. And those are some cars, as I mentioned. That doesn't mean he doesn't care or didn't care about results. It just means that he, first and foremost, wanted to be validated by winning arguments in his sphere of competency.

Starting point is 00:13:18 You really want to avoid, I encourage you to avoid, this type of myopic, often self-defeating behavior. And part of the way that you avoid it is by experimenting in a diversity, in a, in a, in a, with a diversity of intellectual playgrounds, all right, leading to more confidence, more empathy, instead of fear and sort of knee-jerk, xenophobic, defensive behavior. All right, last reason, guys, and this is just a few more minutes. Last reason, number one, the most important, it's more fun. It is more fun to be a jack of many trades. And in the most serious existential sense, the jack of all trades maximizes his or her number of peak experiences in life. That's it. All right. I'll repeat it because it's

Starting point is 00:14:05 very important. The jack of all trades or many trades maximizes his number of peak experiences in life. He or she also learns to enjoy the pursuit of excellence unrelated to material gain, all while finding the few things he or she is truly uniquely suited to dominate. All right. So you can also be a jack of many trades and pick one to really pursue being the best at. They're not mutually exclusive. But if we look at the specialist who imprisons himself in self-inflicted one-dimensionality,

Starting point is 00:14:39 pursuing impossible perfection, let's say, in a very incremental way, he or she can spend decades stagnant or making imperceptible incremental improvements right the the curious generalist wow i'm getting all porky pig on you guys the curious the curious generalist often consistently measures improvements in quantum leaps and this reminds me of a conversation i had last week with a former specialist, a programmer, who's now a CEO,

Starting point is 00:15:08 and he was talking about his sister in government being happy with a 1% improvement over a year, whereas he's really driving his entire organization for improvements in 20, 30, 100% increments. And I think that at the highest level, it's people who can sort of look at the same problems that have been examined before and see something different or look at things that are previously unconnected, not considered interrelated, who have the insights necessary in a highly competitive world to win sort of in the full contact sport that is business or life.

Starting point is 00:15:48 All right. So leadership requires considering many different perspectives and therefore requires many different skills outside of one's core competency. All right. Now, this is easy to wrap up. In conclusion, number one, don't put on experiential blinders in the name of specializing. It's both unnecessary and I consider it crippling. Those who label you a jack of all trades, master of none are seldom satisfied with themselves. So why take their

Starting point is 00:16:18 advice? You should be seeking to emulate the people you aspire to be like. And part of that is not trying to please everyone. There may not be one path to success, but the sure path to failure is trying to please everyone. And I would like to wrap up with a description of the incredible Alfred Lee Loomis. Alfred Lee Loomis, L-O-O-M-I-S, who was a generalist of the highest order who changed the entire course of World War II with his private science experiments as an amateur. So this very short excerpt is taken from

Starting point is 00:16:53 an incredible portrait of his life from a book titled Tuxedo Park, and here it is. Quote, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize. Financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, amateur, dilettante, a contradiction in terms. End quote. So I encourage you, be too complex to categorize. It's fun, and it's very, very productive and it makes life richer.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Be too complex to categorize. Specialization is for insects. You should look far and wide because there are many different worlds to conquer. And so with all this in mind, ask yourself, if I could become world-class at an entire set of skills, a half dozen, a dozen skills, each in six months or less, which would I choose? Do not settle for partial incompleteness because you don't have to. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep. 19: The Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades

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