Jack-of-all-trades, master of none syndrome. How do you stick with something?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I tend to have the problem that I’m interested in a great many things and would love to learn and master everything, but of course I can’t and as a result, I tend to give up on developing new skills and areas of knowledge before getting especially proficient in any one of them. What scares me is that I’ve tried so many things and have never been able to break this pattern. I’m afraid I’ll never become an “expert” at anything because I don’t have the dedication, no matter how interesting I may find it initially.

It seems apparent to me that the reason is due to the diminishing returns inherent in learning any new skill. You can take a crash course on something completely new to you and in a matter of hours/days learn quite a lot about it that you didn’t know before, and/or improve your skill dramatically from the starting point of zero. That illumination process is very intrinsically rewarding to me. But the more I learn and practice something, those rewards naturally taper off the the point that I can put in a lot of time and effort for only a small improvement in skill or knowledge. At this point whatever thing it is becomes much less interesting and I tend to abandon it and move on to something new so I can feel that “learning rush” again. I admire people who can become so focused on one thing that they become masters/experts/aficionados after consuming all the knowledge they can and practicing day in and day out. I just don’t know how to do that. Where does one get that kind of discipline?

2

Who says you have to?

Become a generalist instead :slight_smile: Works for me!

Now more seriously (although I am a generalist, and Spanish culture favors that over specialization), I think you may be setting your aims too high at first. Instead of setting out to “master things”, set out to “learn them”. I’ve known many people who were dejected or even angry at themselves because they hadn’t mastered a second language after three years of thrice-a-week lessons, but… how long did it take them to become proficient in their first? And they don’t even want to be proficient in a second, they want to “master” it in ten lessons! If they can’t remember a word in their first language they shrug it away, if it’s in their second it’s the end of the world.

Learn to enjoy learning.

3

Yeah yeah yeah, stop coming up with stuff after hitting submit, yeah yeah…

Being from Spain, my Chem Eng training involved a lot of “chemistry base” (General Chem; Quali Analysis; Quanti Analisys; Inorganic; Chem of Complexes; Chrystallography; Traditional Phys Chem; Quantum Phys Chem; two other Quantum Chem courses; Biochem; Chem of Natural Products…), as well as the Organic Chem which was my “specialty”. I’ve met Organic Chemists from other countries who had studied Orgo exclusively - and I was better at it than they were because of that general information; I didn’t just know a bunch of recipes (which you can find in books), I knew the whys and wherefores and could thus beat the crap out of them at creating new recipes. Generalist can kick specialist at the specialist’s own craft, if done right.

4

I certainly do. But my perfectionistic tendencies tell me that if I can’t be the best at something (or at least really, really good at it), then I don’t want to do it at all. And I recognize that mastery is a process but I never seem to have the patience to keep at it for the long haul that it takes to get there. So I inevitably get frustrated and give up well before reaching that point.

5

Join my family, the negative perfectionists like you are over there.

My own mantras to avoid the negative part of perfectionism:

  • Perfect is the enemy of good.
  • We do what we can with the resources at hand.

One which I’ve heard other positive perfectionists use:

  • It’s not an obstacle, it’s a goddamn chance to improve and by God I’m going to flatten it.

Littlebro was convinced that I was overestimating his English-language skills. I was convinced he was underestimating them. Then he came to visit me in Philadelphia and, hey, Bigsis was right! :stuck_out_tongue: He was able to learn two important lessons: one, accept Bigsis’ estimations, she’s good at that; two, “not perfect” doesn’t equal “not good”.

If you had taken the same approach to reading, writing and speaking English that you take with these other things, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Remind yourself of that when the “I will never be good enough at this!” hits, please.

6

You only have one life. If you want to do a lot of different things, do them. Expertise is great, but wisdom grows from the breadth of experience, not the depth.

7

I can’t tell you; all I can do is sympathize, because I’m the same way. I love learning new things and having new experiences, but sticking with an interest for the long haul seems to be beyond me. I learn something new, get good at it, then I want to learn the next thing.

I’m not at all sure that you CAN change from being like this to being super focussed for the long term. I don’t think it’s a personality flaw, just different from other people. It sure doesn’t make working for a living easy, though, when you can never stick with a job (well, I never can - that’s why I’m a temp).

8

I think there’s something to be said for being a jack-of-all-trades.

You may not be a master in any of the things you know, but you have the basics. Which means that if you HAD to master one of them (like a new job duty required you to), then you wouldn’t have to start off from scratch.

Learning skills, particularly work-related skills, is tricky. There’s a reason why few people become experts in more than one thing. To become an expert, you have to hyperfocus on that one thing, and probably be pretty passionate/obsessive about it. Also, to get to an “expert” level, you have to know that thing backwards and forwards.

I’m thinking of some software applications that I work with, like Excel or ArcGIS. Most people are only going to learn how to do the obvious things (for Excel, getting simple descriptive statistics, creating graphs, maybe creating pivot tables.) For ArcGIS, they’ll learn how to plot coordinates, create shapefiles, and perhaps how to edit them. These are the things an introductory book or course is going to teach you and all that will be required for your day-to-day operations. Chances are you won’t be taught how to use array formulas or Visual Basic, for instance, or how to do geostatistics or use xml…and you won’t suffer because you won’t even know these things exist. To do learn these more advanced skills, you have to have an actual problem to work with. A real problem that must be fixed in some limited amount of time, and there’s no one but you who can do it. Sometimes that means “creating” the problem and assigning yourself to the task and realizing, “Hey, I’m going to have to learn how to do ___ in order to do this.” And that is really the hard part. Seeing a problem that no one else has seen and having the confidence to take it on, no matter how many unlearned skills you realize you need to learn.

That’s how I’ve learned. I can go home and tell myself, “I’m going to learn kml!” but without an actual goal like, “I’m going to create a Google Earth map that does this and this”, then I’m not going to be motivated to really learning kml at an advanced level.

Within my limited field, I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades, while knowing some things much better than others. I care more about being a master problem-solver than a master of a particular “thing.” I think being a jack-of-all-trades lends itself to being a better problem-solving than being a specialist.