Jack of All Trades

“Jack of all trades, master of none…”

How many times have you heard that in your life? In your career as an engineer? I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times, if not thousands, from working on RADAR and various sorts of radio and other electronics in the US Air Force to as recently as last week. There seems to be a feeling that if you can’t know one thing really well unless you somehow give up on knowing a lot of other things — perhaps there is some sort of limiter in our brains that keeps us from learning more than a certain amount of “stuff” in a single lifetime, or some such nonsense. We’ve all seen the Sherlock Holmes moment, for instance, when Sherlock says something about not remembering something because he has so much other stuff to remember.

And we come back to this idea: Jack of all trades, master of none.

Now I’ll readily admit that I only have so much time to read, and therefore to learn new things. I have four or five wish lists on Amazon, each of which has more than 100 books on it. I have a reading list in Logos Bible Continue reading