Jack Of All Trades

Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times,

At 9:40 at night, I walked out of the restaurant and looked down at my hands. They were stained with pigment – reds, pinks, and earthy browns worked into the cracks around my fingernails from making makeup.

I had just finished making 200 tins of lipstick and eyeshadow for our farm store, the final task of the day. I felt that particular satisfaction that comes from looking at something that didn’t exist a few hours earlier and knowing: I made that. Now, it was time to go back up the hill and put my children to bed.

As I walked, I started thinking about what else those hands had done that day.

My morning started with writing an article and doing homework with my 6-year-old. By 8 a.m., I was setting up for the pumpkin patch. I ordered food for an upcoming event, negotiated contracts, and worked through last-minute event details. I set up the arts-and-crafts booth and decoupaged a pumpkin as an example. I decorated the restaurant for fall.

I recorded a podcast, served customers, made lattes, covered someone’s break in the kitchen, and cooked on the grill. I organized and unpacked things and spent an unreasonable amount of time searching for things I knew we owned but couldn’t find.

A bull got out. We moved a refrigerator.

I squeezed in half an hour to work on the homeschool curriculum I am writing and on a children’s coloring book. I made ice cream. I wanted to make popsicles, but the popsicles didn’t make the cut. I set up tea-making and bath-salt-making stations.

Somewhere inside all of that were children who needed food, water, and love, a puppy who needed cleaning up after, and a ranch that continued being a ranch regardless of my to-do list.

At 9:40, there I was with pigment-stained hands, strangely satisfied by 200 little tins of homemade makeup. I wasn’t thinking, look how much I accomplished. I was thinking about how completely unrelated almost everything I had done was.

Writer. Teacher. Event planner. Buyer. Contract negotiator. Crafter. Podcaster. Waitress. Barista. Line cook. Rancher. Curriculum writer. Ice-cream maker. Mother.

None of them fully describe me, and I am certainly not a master of most of them.

That’s when an old phrase floated into my head: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

I had heard it my entire life, and I don’t remember it ever being a compliment. It was almost a warning: Pick something. Specialize. Get really good at one thing.

Then, last year, I came across a version I had never heard: “Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.”

I thought, wait. Nobody ever told me the rest.

It turns out nobody had withheld it from me. The complimentary ending appears to be a modern addition, circulating online by at least 2005 and appearing on Wikipedia by 2006 as though it were the “full saying.” The expression has roots stretching back to Shakespeare’s world in the late 1500s and has been reworked over the centuries. Perhaps “though oftentimes better than master of one” is simply our century’s contribution.

Strangely, I like that story better. Maybe somebody wasn’t restoring an old proverb. Maybe they were restoring an old idea: There is real value in being able to do many things reasonably well.

Specialization has given us extraordinary things. I don’t want someone who dabbles in brain surgery operating on my brain. There are places where mastery matters enormously. But I wonder whether, in celebrating specialization, we have slowly surrendered something else: ordinary human competence.

I think about my grandparents’ generation, my parents’ generation, my generation, and now my children. It isn’t true of every family, but the general direction seems difficult to miss. With each generation, many mundane skills have become less necessary and consequently less common.

Not impressive skills. The little things.

Sewing on a button. Sharpening a knife. Making soup from whatever is left in the refrigerator. Growing something and knowing when to harvest it. Preserving food. Starting a fire. Changing a tire. Repairing something instead of replacing it. Using basic tools. Caring for a sick animal. Making bread. Entertaining a child without a screen. Sitting beside someone who is dying. Burying something you loved.

These aren’t hobbies. For most of human history, they were simply life.

Our ancestors didn’t necessarily learn these things because they were interested in self-sufficiency. They knew them because not knowing had consequences. When pants tore, you repaired them. When the garden produced too many tomatoes, you preserved them. When something broke, you tried to fix it.

Convenience has relieved us of enormous drudgery, and I am grateful for much of it. I don’t romanticize scrubbing clothes against a washboard. I own a washing machine and am very happy about it.

But there is a difference between being freed from having to do something and losing the ability to do it.

Where is the balance between enjoying the extraordinary amenities of modern life and maintaining the skills necessary to be well-rounded, useful human beings?

I don’t know.

Human beings have always traded, learned from specialists, and benefited from someone else being better at a particular task. But perhaps there is a threshold somewhere between “I don’t have to do this myself” and “I couldn’t do anything for myself if I had to.”

We may have access to more information than anyone before us, yet become less practically capable. We can find instructions for almost anything in seconds, yet increasingly outsource the doing itself. How many pieces of our lives can we outsource before we lose something essential?

Perhaps that is why ranch life has changed me so profoundly. A ranch constantly hands you problems for which you are wildly underqualified. Something breaks. Something escapes. Something is born. Something won’t start. Something leaks. Something needs to be moved and weighs 600 pounds. Customers are arriving in 20 minutes, and somewhere a child is asking about fractions.

There is rarely time to announce, “I’m not trained for this.”

You figure it out.

Eventually, “I don’t know how” stops being a conclusion and becomes the first sentence of a process. I ask somebody. I read. I watch. I try. I screw it up. I ask somebody better than me. I try again. Sometimes, I become good at it. Sometimes, I remain mediocre. Sometimes, I learn enough to realize this particular job really does require a master, and I call one.

Being a jack of all trades doesn’t mean expertise is worthless. It teaches you not to confuse “I am not a master” with “I am incapable.”

I think about this with my children. We ask children remarkably early what they want to “be” when they grow up, as though adulthood requires collapsing an entire human being into a noun: doctor, lawyer, farmer, engineer, artist.

Maybe we should also ask: What do you want to know how to do?

I want my children to grow something. Cook something. Fix something. Build something. Care for something. Make something beautiful. Earn money. Give something away. Comfort someone. Recognize when they need help. Fail without concluding that failure says something permanent about who they are.

Most of all, I want them to encounter something they have never done and think, I could probably learn.

That may be one of the most important forms of sovereignty there is. Capability is sovereignty, too. Every useful thing you know how to do gives you another small place in your life where helplessness doesn’t get the final word.

Maybe that is what bothered me about “Jack of all trades, master of none.” It assumes the highest purpose of learning is mastery. Sometimes, it isn’t. Sometimes, knowing enough to feed someone, stop the leak, or keep the calf alive until morning is enough.

At 9:40 that night, my hands were stained with pigment. I wasn’t a master cosmetic maker, teacher, crafter, barista, event planner, or refrigerator mover. The day had simply presented me with things that needed doing, and I had done as many as I could.

The popsicles would have to wait.

I don’t know exactly where the balance lies between embracing conveniences that make our lives better and surrendering so much competence that we no longer know how to live without them. Maybe there isn’t one universal line. But it is a question worth asking ourselves and worth asking as we raise the next generation.

Not only, what will you become a master of?

But also, what will you refuse to forget how to do?

Mollie Engelhart, regenerative farmer and rancher at Sovereignty Ranch, is committed to food sovereignty, soil regeneration, and educating on homesteading and self-sufficiency. She is the author of “Debunked by Nature“: Debunk Everything You Thought You Knew About Food, Farming, and Freedom – a raw, riveting account of her journey from vegan chef and LA restaurateur to hands-in-the-dirt farmer, and how nature shattered her cultural programming.