You’ve got to find your passion, they say. Jack of all trades, master of none, they say.
Sadly, I’m a jack of all trades.
Well, some trades.
You wouldn’t ask me to fix your car or sing an opera or join your indoor cricket team, and I’m a hazard with electric wiring, but I have made a pretty good fist of tiling, fixing broken plumbing, cutting hair, and mending damaged artworks.
I sometimes think I’m like the Bob Dylan song, Is Your Love in Vain: “Can you cook (yes), sew (yes), make flowers grow (sometimes), do you understand my pain?”
Oh, for god’s sake, I’m busy tiling a wall here, Bob!
Only last week I performed minor veterinary work on one of my dogs, saving myself the cost of a trip to the vet.
Also, I’m trying to learn both Spanish and isiZulu at the same time, which can be baffling.
Isinkwa noma frijoles, padre?
In addition, I write, I DJ, I draw, I make little drinkies…
However, while being a jack of not quite all trades, I am certainly a master of none.
I realised how true this was in my art class the other week when we were given an assignment: to focus on an obsession.
Keenly aware of the irony, I spent several days trying to think up an obsession, then did my presentation on Brad Pitt, tongue firmly in cheek.
While everyone giggled at my saucy PowerPoint slides, I wondered… was it time to choose one thing I’m moderately good at and to laser in on it, to make it my one true passion? To master it?
“But that’s not how the full saying goes,” said a friend, “there’s more,” but she didn’t remember the detail, so I checked with another clever-clogs friend, Google.
Turns out the full, modern phrase goes something like this: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Meanwhile, this insult we throw around when someone is tinkering in many things is Shakespearian in origin: “Johannes Factotum.”
However, Shakespeare himself never said it.
Instead, it was said about him, a jibe at this ill-educated upstart who dabbled in everything from building sets, to directing, to acting, to theatre management, to, yes, even a spot of writing…
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