Jack Of All Trades Quotes

Jack of all trades, master of none, though often better than a master of one.

...each individual can only do one thing well. He can't do lots of things. If he tries, he will be jack of all trades, and master of none.

In the modern workplace, you gotta be a jack-of-all-trades. Mastering your career is all about being adaptable, versatile, and always learning.

Jack of all trades, master of none

His tavern sign bore witness to his feats of arms. He had painted it himself, being a Jack-of-all-trades who did everything badly.

You can achieve anything, but not everything.

There are species that can run faster, climb higher, dig deeper, or hit harder, but humans are special because we can run, climb, dig, and hit. The phrase jack of all trades, master of none fits us perfectly. If life on earth were like the Olympic Games, the only event that humans would ever win is the decathlon. (Unless chess became an Olympic sport.)

Jack of all trades or master of one? If you're a master of one, you'll soon be a master of none. Times are a changin. Be a jack of all trades. Or better, master of many!

Jack of all trades, master of none...He'd always thought knowing many things gave him strength. Now it made him feel vulnerable.

If instead of saying, “I’m going to do this trade,” you say, “I’m going to watch myself do this trade,” all of a sudden you find that the process is a lot easier.

The man who employs either his labour or his stock in a grater variety of ways than his situation renders necessary, can never hurt his neighbour by underselling him. He may hurt himself, and he generally does so. Jack of all trades will never be rich, says the proverb. But the law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situations they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislator can do.

I feel as though I should say something profound, or enact some rite, or trade something to make it official. I want to transfer some trinket which would allow me to say that she's my girl, some kind of currency that proves to people that she likes me back. Something that would permit me to think about her all the time without feeling guilty or helpless or hopelessly far away. I guess I'm just so excited, I want to cage this thing like a tiny red bird so if can't fly away, so it stays the same, so it's still there the next time. For keeps, like a coin in your pocket. Like a peach pit from Mad Jack Lionel's tree. Like scribbled words in a locked suitcase. A bright balloon to tie to your bedpost. And you want to hug it close, hold it, but not so tight it bursts.

That is the nature of falsehoods. Like a small debt incurred, the interest builds, and when collection is due, the burden is much greater than the original lie was worth.

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

There are species that can run faster, climb higher, dig deeper, or hit harder, but humans are special because we can run, climb, dig, and hit. The phrase jack of all trades, master of none fits us perfectly.

I discovered that you can’t train people how to trade by just imparting knowledge. The key to trading success is emotional discipline. Making money has nothing to do with intelligence. Think of all the bright people that choose careers on Wall Street. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading.

Success comes by strengthening your strengths more than improving on your weaknesses. If you can maximize the potential of your strength then you become a champion while if you work harder on your weaknesses you be come Jack of all trade.

Let's be serious, I wasn't a jack of all trades. I was just a jack-off of none. A hubristic fool who lived in my mind, certain I was better than everyone. An irredeemable asshole that for some reason people tolerated and occasionally even liked.

you’ve clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women’s studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above.

You will be someone who is never late. You will be someone who takes care of his men, gets to know them, and puts their needs before yours. You will be someone who does not quit in the face of adversity. You will be someone who takes charge and leads when no one else will. You will be detail oriented, always vigilant. You will be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool. You will have a sense of humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours. You will work hard and perform even when no one is watching. You will be creative and think outside the box, even if it gets you in trouble. You are a rebel, but not a mutineer. You are a jack of all trades and master of none.

20. Lack of concentration of effort. The “jack-of-all-trades” seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

Automation won’t take your job, but the self-inflicted imprisonment of industrial isolation will.

You can be extraordinary in anything but not in everything.

Depth gets context with breadth and vice versa.

Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of them worked out. “These are life’s little learning experiences,” he said. “You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’ “At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.” Adams writes “slowly and painfully.” “People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts,” he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they haven’t put a guard on the door yet.

As a writer, I've never limited myself to a specific genre or topic. A person is never just one thing. Like multi-faced dice, there are so many sides to a person; Funny, dramatic, romantic...the list goes on. When I write horror, I do it to my best. When I write comedy, I do that to my best. But, I'm a jack of all trades. It's fun to challenge yourself, breaking the limits of a genre.

The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars.

While the methods of enforcing regulation varied between countries, the concept that they all shared in common was that women in the sex trade should shoulder the blame for the transmission of syphilis.

The truth is that you aren’t lacking a destiny or purpose. There is a very good reason for your insatiable curiosity: you’re someone who’s going to shake things up, create something novel, solve complex, multidimensional problems, make people’s lives better in your own unique way. Whatever your destinies are, you can’t step into them while stifling your multipotentiality. You must embrace it and use it.

I am a jack-of-all-trades. I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist (one who doesn't draw or paint or sew) and I write everything but poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope and a burgeoning self-help guru and a girl who wants to look pretty and a girl who wants to look sexy and a girl who wants to look girly and a woman in her middle forties who wishes not to look like anything at all, who wishes sometimes to vanish.

On the American Oligarchy "How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience. "And what about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters–not the great, virile noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you all over again–but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajoling and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling today in this trade-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of your slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

The real Doctor Fitzpiers was a man of too many hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice in the rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for the present.

As I write these lines I lift my eyes and look seaward.  I am on the beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu.  Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea.  Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green.  Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red.  Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks.  Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf.

And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-the soil, lethal-weapon-with-leggings, bona fide hero. And for a guy who never marries, he has a lot of offspring. Shane. The Virginian. The Ringo Kid. The Man with No Name. Just think how many actors would have had no careers without Natty Bumppo. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Tom Mix. Clint Eastwood. Silent. Laconic. More committed to their horse or buddy than to a lady. Professional. Deadly. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence waxes prolix on Natty's most salient feature: he's a killer. And so are his offspring. This heros can talk, stiltedly to be sure, but he prefers silence. He appreciates female beauty but is way more committed to his canoe or his business partner (his business being death and war) or, most disturbingly, his long rifle, Killdeer. Dr. Freud, your three-o'clock is here. Like those later avatars, he is a wilderness god, part backwoods sage, part cold-blooded killer, part unwilling Prince Charming, part jack-of-all-trades, but all man. Here's how his creator describes him: 'a philosopher of the wilderness, simple-minded, faithful, utterly without fear, yet prudent.' A great character, no doubt, but hardly a person. A paragon. An archetype. A miracle. But a potentially real person--not so much.

Specialists will continue to lose not because of automation, but because of the imprisonment of industrial isolation. Leaders and innovators who stay relevant see the interconnectedness of a broad use of skillsets that specialists can’t see and use creativity to solve problems in times of complexity.

This man is different. He can fix anything, do anything. He doesn’t work with knowledge, with science—the classified accumulation of facts. He knows nothing. It’s not in his head, a form of learning. He works by intuition—his power is in his hands, not his head. Jack-of-all-trades. His hands! Like a painter, an artist. In his hands—and he cuts across our lives like a knife-blade.

The label “jack-of-all-trades but master of none” is normally meant to be derogatory, implying that the labelee lacks the focus to really dive into a subject and master it. But, when your online shopping application is on the fritz and you’re losing orders by the hundreds as each hour passes, it’s the jack-of-all-trades who not only knows how the application’s code works but can also do low-level UNIX debugging of your web server processes, analyze your RDBMS’s configuration for potential performance bottlenecks, and check your network’s router configuration for hard-to-find problems. And, more important, after finding the problem, the jack-of-all-trades can quickly make architecture and design decisions, implement code fixes, and deploy a new fixed system to production. In this scenario, the manufacturing scenario seems quaint at best and critically flawed at worst.

Of all the birds, they are the ones who mind their being armless most: witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk back and forth like rifle bolts. How they heave their shoulders into each stride as if they hoped that by some chance new bones there would come popping out with a boxing glove on the end of each. Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked with too much grease, they convene on my lawn to strategize for their class-action suit. Flight they would trade in a New York minute for a black muscle car and a fist on the shift at any stale green light. But here in my yard by the Jack-in-the-Box Dumpster they can only fossick in the grass for remnants of the world’s stale buns. And this despite all the crow poems that have been written because men like to see themselves as crows (the head-jerk performed in the rearview mirror, the dark brow commanding the rainy weather). So I think I know how they must feel: ripped off, shook down, taken to the cleaners. What they’d like to do now is smash a phone against a wall. But they can’t, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.

In 2015 the winter was unseasonably warm. I remember it well enough to feel a pang of sentiment toward those days. Children were playing in the sunshine, bathing suits donned long after swimwear should have been traded for jeans and sweaters. We were all so happy that Jack Frost had forgotten us that year. We didn't know any better, but it should have been our first hint that the world was going wrong. Five years later, when the crops were all burnt, and the sun wasn't drawn with a happy face on a child's illustration anymore, we would all have chance for regret. The

Do you really believe that freedom of choice exists? India still has a caste system. Most of the Middle East treats women as inferiors and those who practice other religions as enemies. China regulates how many children couples can have, genocide abounds in South America and Africa, Malaysia has a booming underage sex trade, and the list goes on and on. All around the world the people in power abuse it and human rights are ignored. But what if we were incapable of hurting our fellow man? What if our core impulse was to help each other rather than control each other? The human race is destructive. This research could fix it. Purify it.

Again, the publick shewed that they would bear their share in these things; the very Court, which was then gay and luxurious, put on a face of just concern for the publick danger. All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming tables, publick dancing rooms, and music houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such-like doings, which had bewitched the poor common people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenances even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their graves, not of mirth and diversions.

A beautiful example of a long-term intention was presented by A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka. For seventeen years there had been a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. At one point, the Norwegians were able to broker peace, and once the peace treaty was in effect, Ariyaratane called the followers of his Sarvodaya movement together. Sarvodaya combines Buddhist principles of right livelihood, right action, right understanding, and compassion and has organized citizens in one-third of that nation’s villages to dig wells, build schools, meditate, and collaborate as a form of spiritual practice. Over 650,000 people came to the gathering to hear how he envisioned the future of Sri Lanka. At this gathering he proposed a five-hundred-year peace plan, saying, “The Buddha teaches we must understand causes and conditions. It’s taken us five hundred years to create the suffering that we are in now.” Ari described the effects of four hundred years of colonialism, of five hundred years of struggle between Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, and of several centuries of economic disparity. He went on, “It will take us five hundred years to change these conditions.” Ariyaratane then offered solutions, proposing a plan to heal the country. The plan begins with five years of cease-fire and ten years of rebuilding roads and schools. Then it goes on for twenty-five years of programs to learn one another’s languages and cultures, and fifty years of work to right economic injustice, and to bring the islanders back together as a whole. And every hundred years there will be a grand council of elders to take stock on how the plan is going. This is a sacred intention, the long-term vision of an elder. In the same way, if we envision the fulfillment of wisdom and compassion in the United States, it becomes clear that the richest nation on earth must provide health care for its children; that the most productive nation on earth must find ways to combine trade with justice; that a creative society must find ways to grow and to protect the environment and plan sustainable development for generations ahead. A nation founded on democracy must bring enfranchisement to all citizens at home and then offer the same spirit of international cooperation and respect globally. We are all in this together.

It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. In consequence, I’d started going through the store, removing some tags (so the customer would have to come to me for the price) and changing others—not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.

Now, who and what is this minstrel in reality? Where does he come from? In what respects does he differ from his predecessors? He has been described as a cross between the early medieval court-singer and the ancient mime of classical times. The mime had never ceased to flourish since the days of classical antiquity; when even the last traces of classical culture disappeared, the descendants of the old mimes still continued to travel about the Empire, entertaining the masses with their unpretentious, unsophisticated and unliterary art. The Germanic countries were flooded out with mimes in the early Middle Ages; but until the ninth century the poets and singers at the courts kept themselves strictly apart from them. Not until they lost their cultured audience, as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance and the clericalism of the following generation, and came up against the competition of the mimes in the lower classes, did they have, to a certain extent, to become mimes themselves in order to be able to compete with their rivals. Thus both singers and comedians now move in the same circles, intermingle and influence each other so much that they soon become indistinguishable from one another. The mime and the scop both become the minstrel. The most striking characteristic of the minstrel is his versatility. The place of the cultured, highly specialized heroic ballad poet is now taken by the Jack of all trades, who is no longer merely a poet and singer, but also a musician and dancer, dramatist and actor, clown and acrobat, juggler and bear-leader, in a word, the universal jester and maître de plaisir of the age. Specialization, distinction and solemn dignity are now finished with; the court poet has become everybody’s fool and his social degradation has such a revolutionary and shattering effect on himself that he never entirely recovers from the shock. From now on he is one of the déclassés, in the same class as tramps and prostitutes, runaway clerics and sent-down students, charlatans and beggars. He has been called the ‘journalist of the age’, but he really goes in for entertainment of every kind: the dancing song as well as the satirical song, the fairy story as well as the mime, the legend of saints as well as the heroic epic. In this context, however, the epic takes on quite new features: it acquires in places a more pointed character with a new straining after effect, which was absolutely foreign to the spirit of the old heroic ballad. The minstrel no longer strikes the gloomy, solemn, tragi-heroic note of the ‘Hildebrandslied’, for he wants to make even the epic sound entertaining; he tries to provide sensations, effective climaxes and lively epigrams. Compared with the monuments of the older heroic poetry, the ‘Chanson de Roland’ never fails to reveal this popular minstrel taste for the piquant.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK WHAT TO DO FIRST 1. Find the MAP. It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one. It will be found in the front part of your brochure, quite near the page that says For Mom and Dad for having me and for Jeannie (or Jack or Debra or Donnie or …) for putting up with me so supportively and for my nine children for not interrupting me and for my Publisher for not discouraging me and for my Writers’ Circle for listening to me and for Barbie and Greta and Albert Einstein and Aunty May and so on. Ignore this, even if you are wondering if Albert Einstein is Albert Einstein or in fact the dog. This will be followed by a short piece of prose that says When the night of the wolf waxes strong in the morning, the wise man is wary of a false dawn. Ka’a Orto’o, Gnomic Utterances Ignore this too (or, if really puzzled, look up GNOMIC UTTERANCES in the Toughpick section). Find the Map. 2. Examine the Map. It will show most of a continent (and sometimes part of another) with a large number of BAYS, OFFSHORE ISLANDS, an INLAND SEA or so and a sprinkle of TOWNS. There will be scribbly snakes that are probably RIVERS, and names made of CAPITAL LETTERS in curved lines that are not quite upside down. By bending your neck sideways you will be able to see that they say things like “Ca’ea Purt’wydyn” and “Om Ce’falos.” These may be names of COUNTRIES, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell. These empty inland parts will be sporadically peppered with little molehills, invitingly labeled “Megamort Hills,” “Death Mountains, ”Hurt Range” and such, with a whole line of molehills near the top called “Great Northern Barrier.” Above this will be various warnings of danger. The rest of the Map’s space will be sparingly devoted to little tiny feathers called “Wretched Wood” and “Forest of Doom,” except for one space that appears to be growing minute hairs. This will be tersely labeled “Marshes.” This is mostly it. No, wait. If you are lucky, the Map will carry an arrow or compass-heading somewhere in the bit labeled “Outer Ocean” and this will show you which way up to hold it. But you will look in vain for INNS, reststops, or VILLAGES, or even ROADS. No – wait another minute – on closer examination, you will find the empty interior crossed by a few bird tracks. If you peer at these you will see they are (somewhere) labeled “Old Trade Road – Disused” and “Imperial Way – Mostly Long Gone.” Some of these routes appear to lead (or have lead) to small edifices enticingly titled “Ruin,” “Tower of Sorcery,” or “Dark Citadel,” but there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places. In short, the Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get. And, be warned. If you take this Tour, you are going to have to visit every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a Rule. 3. Find your STARTING POINT. Let us say it is the town of Gna’ash. You will find it down in one corner on the coast, as far away from anywhere as possible. 4. Having found Gna’ash, you must at once set about finding an INN, Tour COMPANIONS, a meal of STEW, a CHAMBER for the night, and then the necessary TAVERN BRAWL. (If you look all these things up in the Toughpick section, you will know what you are in for.) The following morning, you must locate the MARKET and attempt to acquire CLOTHING (which absolutely must include a CLOAK), a SADDLE ROLL, WAYBREAD, WATERBOTTLES, a DAGGER, a SWORD, a HORSE, and a MERCHANT to take you along in his CARAVAN. You must resign yourself to being cheated over most prices and you are advised to consult a local MAGICIAN about your Sword. 5. You set off. Now you are on your own. You should turn to the Toughpick section of this brochure and select your Tour on a pick-and-mix basis, remembering only that you will have to take in all of it.

Do you really believe that freedom of choice exists? India still has a caste system. Most of the Middle East treats women as inferiors and those who practice other religions as enemies. China regulates how many children couples can have, genocide abounds in South America and Africa, Malaysia has a booming underage sex trade, and the list goes on and on. All around the world the people in power abuse it and human rights are ignored. But what if we were incapable of hurting our fellow man? What if our core impulse was to help each other rather than control each other?

It’s like Jack Kennedy,” DeMarco said to Emma. “All the rumors about Joe Kennedy being a bootlegger and having ties to the mob and getting rich on insider trading never really hurt Jack. It sounds like the same thing with Stephanie. By the time she jumped onto the political stage, her old man was dead, his money had been laundered clean, she had nothing to do with his past life.

I wanted to be an Author...Now I'm an Author, Marketing apprentice, Jack of all trades and master of none!

They were also lucky to have two electricians. Well, one really. The other was mostly a jack-of-all-trades. Funny how in this new reality, all those fancy university degrees weren’t good for more than wiping your ass with. Soon, it would be the tradesmen who would rule the world.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

depth of knowledge is important, but people who have depth without breadth do not become the sort of jack-of-all-trades that a founder needs to be.39

A generalizing specialist is more than just a generalist. A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Big difference.

While it is possible to be competent with both hands in a given activity, ambidexterity works on the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-jack principle.

Your calling is not just one thing; it’s a few things. The trick is to not be a jack-of-all-trades but to become a master of some.

years old or thereabouts, may she be spared. Still alive. She did a little singing way back and she sang with old Blind Blake many a time.” “She did?” I said. “She sang with him?” “She sure did,” said the gnarled old guy. “She sang with just about anybody passing through. You got to remember this old town lay right on the big road to Atlanta. That old county road out there used to come on down through here straight on south into Florida. It was the only route through Georgia north to south. Of course now you got the highway runs right by without stopping off, and you got airplanes and all. No importance to Margrave now, nobody coming on through anymore.” “So Blind Blake stopped off here?” I prompted him. “And your sister sang with him?” “Everybody used to stop off here,” he said. “North side of town was just pretty much a mess of bars and rooming houses to cater to the folks passing through. All these fancy gardens between here and the firehouse is where the bars and rooming houses used to be. All tore down now, or else all fell down. Been no passing trade at all for a real long time. But back then, it was a different kind of a town altogether. Streams of people in and out, the whole time. Workers, crop pickers, drummers, fighters, hoboes, truckers, musicians. All kinds of those guys used to stop off and play and my old sister would be right in there

Afterword to “Where Hesperus Falls” Words, words, words are the enemy of a writer. I take great pleasure in simplifying language and sentences whenever I can. If I’ve started something, I write through to the end of the paragraph or section, then go back and prune out whole sentences. I’m pleased if I reach the end having deleted thirty sentences, making the thing tighter without losing any of the impact. Of course, I keep having to go back to make sure that I have the right words and no repetition. Norma catches a lot of this, and it’s a great deal of work. I liked it much better in the old days when I could still see and could assimilate a whole page at a time like other writers do. You mustn’t try too hard to produce effects either. They have to come kind of quietly, sneaking up on you out of the action and feeling. When you want to describe something that’s flamboyant, weird and strange, anything a little bit outrageous, wicked or nasty, you don’t do it by exposition, which can become long-winded and tiresome. You have one of your characters describe it to somebody else. Instead of writing that a man is an evil beast, without a redeeming quality, you have a girl come in out of the cold with her clothes torn and say: ‘I met this fellow, Steve, and he did such and such. That man is a beast. Do you know what he did to Henrietta? He pulled all her hair out.’ I’m exaggerating, but this is almost a trade secret: not having the exposition come from the writer, but rather from the mouths of the characters themselves. So cut those words out. Sometimes you can combine the adjective and the noun into a single notion. Instead of saying there was a horse colored all kinds of different colors, you say a palomino came down the road. —Jack Vance The Phantom Milkman I’ve had all I can stand.

I took a wrong turning and not for the first time. Found myself in a room full of Trade Unionists cooking up their next wage claim – all Tories, of course – didn’t take to me at all.

We have even distorted a famous colonial praise, “Jack of all trades” to derogatorily mean “master of none.” Originally , the intent was to honor a person who could meet whatever challenges arise. For

As a physics major, before getting her hands dirty in New York, she had assumed that money is printed by a nation’s central bank, from where it is distributed to commercial banks. But while this is indeed how cash is created, cash accounts for only 3 per cent of all money. What of the remaining 97 per cent? Surprise and then foreboding were the reactions of every student to whom she had explained how the missing 97 per cent was created – and by whom: not by central banks but by commercial and investment bankers. At this point, her students would ask, ‘Without access to state-sanctioned printing presses, how do private bankers create money?’ ‘Simple,’ she would reply. ‘Every time a banker approves a loan of, say, one million dollars for Jack, a typical business customer, the banker just types 1,000,000 on Jack’s bank statement. However incredible it may seem, that’s all it takes. Bankers create money by granting loans by typing in some numbers!’ The crucial thing, she would explain, is that these numbers are typed into a shared database – or ledger – to which only the bankers have access. When their customers transfer this ‘money’ between them – when Jack transfers numbers from his account to the account of a supplier, say Jill, or of a builder, say Bob, or of a worker, say Kate, and when in turn, Jill, Bob and Kate transfer their numbers on, in the same way, to others to whom they owe money – these numbers simply migrate from one cell in the database to another. For this system to be sustainable, and not merely a pyramid scheme, there is a single condition: that, somewhere down the line, the one million dollars which some banker typed into existence on Jack’s behalf results in new goods and services whose total market value exceeds one million dollars. It is from this surplus that the banker takes his interest and Jack his profit. This is what Iris was referring to as a fool’s wager when she said that bankers plundered value from the future, or when Costa had once claimed that capitalism, like science fiction, trades in future assets using fictitious currency. It is in their nature that the wealthier bankers become by creating money, the more money they tend to create. The danger of such a system, of course, is that the banks end up typing into existence sums of money vastly larger than the market value of the goods and services created as a result of Jack, Jill, Bob and Kate’s endeavours. At the point when the bankers have collectively created money sums greater than the resulting values, the present can no longer repay the future for the money it borrowed from it. The moment Jack, Jill, Bob and Kate get a whiff of this, they may demand their bank balances in cash, sensing that the total value on the bankers’ database is lower than the actual value of their customers’ assets. ‘At that point, a bank run sets in,’ Eva would tell her students, ‘and that’s when the system comes crashing down.

Marvin had held a variety of jobs, from golf caddy to bartender at a strip club, before landing work as John Kerry’s body man four years earlier. It’s a strange role, the body man: a personal assistant and jack-of-all-trades responsible for making sure that the candidate has everything he or she needs to function, whether a favorite snack or a couple of Advil, an umbrella when it’s wet or a scarf when it’s cold,

Types of Forex Strategy Traders Figuring out how to exchange isn't simple particularly with regards to the unfamiliar trade market. You will presumably need to learn it through a Forex exchanging framework. A few people believe that dealers are jack of all methodologies of exchanging yet that is not how things work. The way to fruitful exchanging is to turn into the expert of a couple of exchanging techniques. These couple of exchanging methodologies can take you far. Forex procedure dealer frameworks are broadly utilized by various individuals since they give you structure, a bunch of rules and an arrangement to follow as well. There are sure techniques that are at present utilized in the Forex market and they can even cause you to pick what Forex system broker would be best for you to make due in this market. Indicator Driving Trading Systems These exchanging bargains are planned by the individuals who look at that as a specific set up is working at the present time, yet utilizing this framework calls for wary managing. That is on the grounds that it simply works for the current second. This Forex exchanging framework can't give you uphold for quite a while. The framework utilizes pointers for producing an exchanging signal against the value activity. The pointers consistently slack and subsequently, they will in general give late just as false signals. They are not forward-thinking regardless. Something to be thankful for about this exchanging bargain is that it takes a gander at the graphs and numerous beginner merchants think that it’s valuable and enticing. They think of it as' not difficult to utilize and comprehend. Harmonic trading system The Harmonic trading system framework perceives value designs with the Fibonacci augmentations just as following data and afterward it figures the defining moments in the business sectors. It is an intricate type of exchanging which will call for significant practice. On the off chance that you ace it by training, at that point you will discover it among outstanding amongst other exchanging frameworks as it can offer more significant yields against the danger. You can utilize it for exchanging any sort of market. Technical Trading Systems These are perhaps the most ordinarily utilized exchanging bargains that are basic among Forex merchants. They incorporate climbing triangles, banner examples, shoulder examples, heads and various different examples to allow you to exchange the business sectors. These exchanging frameworks are truly useful and you utilize monetary information from earlier years to anticipate the market patterns and take an action. The Forex technique broker or the Forex exchanging frameworks empower you to ensure that you don't lose while you exchange from the solace of your own home. In any case, be certain that Forex exchanging frameworks are not lucrative aides. You actually need to utilize your own insight in exchanging and assemble loads of exchanging data request to put your cash in the perfect spot. Exchanging isn't some tea. On the off chance that you think by utilizing the exchanging gives you can guarantee making enormous amounts of cash, at that point you are incorrect. You should utilize your experience and viable information to guarantee that the Forex procedure broker you use demonstrates to control you in productive exchanging.

occupation into which you can throw yourself wholeheartedly. 20. Lack of concentration of effort. The “jack-of-all-trades” seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

I know something about everything and everything about something, a jack-of-all-trades and master of one.

People know that Jacks of All Trades are Masters of None, and people seek out masters. They trust specialists. Try to appeal to thousands, and you will appeal strongly to no one. Find a niche.

Back trouble was the curse of the builder and

wasn’t that the way with every builder? No one had all the skills. You come in as a carpenter and they want more and more of you. Plastering, plumbing, roofing. So you say yes to get the work.

Social workers are bastards,

he himself would have fought back. Not easy when you’re naked,

England being England, weather is changeable.

Beautiful, they extolled, that much bandied word, that should be restricted to descriptions of children, flowers and birds of paradise.

filth was one of the things that turned you off sex. Smell and stains.

Twenty-two guys chasing a ball and a whole crowd screaming their heads off. It was an absurd ritual,

When he demanded gold, the Indians brought him copper, and when he demanded silver, they brought him silvery mica, which they mined in the North Carolina mountains, in sheets up to three feet wide and three feet long. De Soto found little precious metal, but an abundance of pearls, especially in the mortuary temples. In one town alone his expedition found 25,000 pounds of pearls. The mortuary temples of the people of Cutifachiqui astounded the Spaniards, who had already seen the cathedrals of Spain, the mosques and fountains of the Arabs, the palace of Montezuma in Mexico, and the gold ransom of Atahualpa in Peru. Outside the massive doors into the temple that housed the pearls, twelve wooden giants stood guard. The huge figures held over their heads massive clubs covered with strips of copper and studded with what appeared to the Spaniards to be diamonds, but may have been mica chips. The Indians had decorated the roof of one temple with pearls and feathers so that it looked to the Spaniards like a building from a fairy tale. Along the sides of the roof, pearls had been suspended from threads so thin that the pearls seemed to be floating in the air around the temple. Inside the temples the Spaniards saw rows of chests, each filled with pearls of uniform size. The Spaniards could not carry all the pearls, but they selected out the best ones for themselves. Ironically, even though De Soto’s expedition was the first into the area, his men also found in the temple some European trade goods—glass, cheap beads, and a rosary—indicating

If you made a country out of all the companies founded by Stanford alumni, it would have a GDP of roughly $ 2.7 trillion, putting it in the neighborhood of the tenth largest economy in the world. Companies started by Stanford alumni include Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, LinkedIn, and E* Trade. Many were started by undergraduates and graduate students while still on campus. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live, the greats who have gone on to massive career success are remembered, but everyone still keeps a watchful eye on the newcomers to see who might be the next big thing. With a $ 17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital.

Lack of concentration of effort. The “jack-of-all-trades” seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

When you’re undercover, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve been everything from a cook to a chemical warfare specialist—though in the Army that’s not such a big difference.

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

They sought not merely to conquer the world but to institute a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all languages.

The hero jack-of-all-trades on-call engineer does work, but the practiced on-call engineer armed with a playbook works much better

All of this,” he said. “Marrying your ‘old menace’, choosing to bind yourself to me—someone far beneath you. All of this trouble only to visit and establish trade with our enemies? Why wouldn’t you choose a partner who could be your shield? A member of the guard, perhaps?” He’s being ridiculously logical, Adaira thought. She wondered how to reply to him. She wanted to tell him that she could see through him—he was holding to logic in order to keep his emotions at bay. But then she saw the glint of doubt in him. She saw the hurt in his eyes. He was hiding a wound. He had never felt claimed; he had never felt as if he belonged here. She vividly remembered him saying those words to her. “You’re right,” she said. “I could choose a member of the guard to bind myself to. I could choose anyone in the east who is eligible. Yet there’s a problem with such a choice, Jack.” He was quiet. She could sense the battle raging with him, to remain aloof and uninterested, or to ask her to explain. “What problem do you speak of, Adaira?” he eventually said. “None of them are the one that I want.

He’s part of the gig economy of the criminal underworld, you could say. A real jack of all trades.

Great entrepreneurs are the jack of all trades, master of some.

A jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

One decision about team composition that early-stage startups often wrestle with is whether to hire for attitude or skill. This is a delicate balance. If founders hire mostly for attitude, their team will be comprised of highly motivated, hardworking, jack-of-all-trade generalists who will shift readily between tasks as circumstances require. Hiring for cultural fit can yield similar results,

He was what they called a Swiss Army knife. He could and would get whatever products the team at the café needed.

From ‘How the Planets Trade’, by Ignace Wodlecki: Cosmopolis, September, 1509: In all commercial communities the prevalence or absence of counterfeit money, spurious bills of exchange, forged notes-of-hand, or any of a dozen other artifices to augment the value of blank paper is a matter of great concern. Across the Oikumene precise duplication and reproducing machines are readily available; and only meticulous safeguards preclude the chronic debasement of our currency. These safeguards are three: first, the single negotiable currency is the Standard Value Unit, or SVU, notes for which, in various denominations, are issued only by the Bank of Sol, the Bank of Rigel and the Bank of Vega. Second, each genuine note is characterized by a ‘quality of authenticity’. Thirdly, the three banks make widely available the so-called ‘fake-meter’. This is a pocket device which, when a counterfeit note is passed through a slot, sounds a warning buzzer. As all small boys know, attempts to disassemble the fake-meter are futile; as soon as the case is damaged, it destroys itself. Regarding the ‘quality of authenticity’ there is naturally a good deal of speculation. Apparently in certain key areas, a particular molecular configuration is introduced, resulting in a standard reactance of some nature: electrical capacity? magnetic permeability? photo-absorption or reflectance? isotopic variation? radioactive doping? a combination of some or all of these qualities? Only a handful of persons know and they won’t tell.

11. Lack of controlled sexual urge. Sex energy is the most powerful of all the stimuli which move people into action. Because it is the most powerful of the emotions, it must be controlled, through transmutation, and converted into other channels. 12. Uncontrolled desire for “something for nothing.” The gambling instinct drives millions of people to failure. Evidence of this may be found in a study of the Wall Street crash of ’29, during which millions of people tried to make money by gambling on stock margins. 13. Lack of a well defined power of decision. Men who succeed reach decisions promptly, and change them, if at all, very slowly. Men who fail reach decisions, if at all, very slowly, and change them frequently, and quickly. Indecision and procrastination are twin brothers. Where one is found, the other may usually be found also. Kill off this pair before they completely “hog-tie” you to the treadmill of failure. 14. One or more of the six basic fears. These fears have been analyzed for you in a later chapter. They must be mastered before you can market your services effectively. 15. Wrong selection of a mate in marriage. This is a most common cause of failure. The relationship of marriage brings people intimately into contact. Unless this relationship is harmonious, failure is likely to follow. Moreover, it will be a form of failure that is marked by misery and unhappiness, destroying all signs of ambition. 16. Over-caution. The person who takes no chances generally has to take whatever is left when others are through choosing. Over-caution is as bad as under-caution. Both are extremes to be guarded against. Life itself is filled with the element of chance. 17. Wrong selection of associates in business. This is one of the most common causes of failure in business. In marketing personal services, one should use great care to select an employer who will be an inspiration, and who is, himself, intelligent and successful. We emulate those with whom we associate most closely. Pick an employer who is worth emulating. 18. Superstition and prejudice. Superstition is a form of fear. It is also a sign of ignorance. Men who succeed keep open minds and are afraid of nothing. 19. Wrong selection of a vocation. No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like. The most essential step in the marketing of personal services is that of selecting an occupation into which you can throw yourself wholeheartedly. 20. Lack of concentration of effort. The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

Dan Pink’s three elements of intrinsic motivation: autonomy (quashed by constant juggling of requests and priorities from multiple teams), mastery (“jack of all trades, master of none”), and purpose (too many domains of responsibility).

The best trades are the ones in which you have all three things going for you: fundamentals, technicals, and market tone.

Alf was a jack-of-all-trades, carpenter, tinsmith, blacksmith, electrician, plasterer, scissors grinder, and cobbler. Alf could do anything, and as a result he was a financial failure although he worked all the time.

The sense in which I do take myself to be a failure is this. I have scattered myself too much. I think I had it in me to make something like a real contribution to philosophical or ethical thought. Unluckily ... I have been a jack of all trades; and instead of striking home, have only done enough to persuade friendly judges that I could have struck.

I'm not a jack of all trades. Nor do I want to be. 

The most successful bloggers are those who are focused and not all over the place. In other words, they are experts in a particular niche or field and are not Jacks-of-all-trades.

Like Edwards, many of the best Renaissance thinkers were blessed with a jack-of-all-trades erudition. When he wasn’t revolutionizing astronomy, Copernicus practiced medicine and law. Johannes Kepler based his theory of planetary motion on the ebb and flow of musical harmony. Better known in his day as a lawyer, statesman, writer, and courtier, Francis Bacon helped to pioneer the scientific method. A theologian named Robert Boyle laid the foundations of modern chemistry. Leonardo da Vinci, the poster boy for polymaths, was a gifted painter, sculptor, musician, anatomist, and writer, as well as a startlingly prolific inventor.

Misery is easy. There’s always a reason to wallow, for no life is perfect. It takes work to smile and laugh and be happy despite the world telling you to surrender. Happiness isn’t about circumstances, and it doesn’t happen by chance.

Happiness isn’t about circumstances, and it doesn’t happen by chance.

I never wavered from the mission: getting the best possible number and price on every game. And no matter the obstacles, via trial and error, I became the best in the world at finding that number and concealing the source. The business of sports betting might seem like quantum physics to the general public. At the highest level, it is closer to psychological warfare between bettor and bookmaker—cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The posted line is just a way to trigger the game. Some cynics assume that my goal was to put every bookie out of business—but nothing could be further from the truth. Bookmakers strive for balance. They never want to tilt too far on one side of the action. Bookies breathe easiest in the middle, taking equal money and profiting off the 10 percent juice. If a bookie was destroyed, it meant he either closed his shop or reduced his limits. Neither scenario did me any good. My goal was to keep the bookmakers in business and expand their limits. This served to increase the size of the market, which meant more potential profit for me. The smartest bookies had solved this riddle and wanted to do business with me directly. They wanted to know straight from the horse’s mouth what games I liked. If they were smart, they took my information and profited by shading their line and forcing customers to the other side, extending limits. A smart bookmaker knows there will be winners and losers. They also understand that there is no business if there are no winners. Translated: the smartest bookmakers are open to all comers—just like baccarat, blackjack, and craps. The brightest bookmakers know they can use smart money for their own benefit. Early in my career, the major-league bookmakers were Bob Martin, Johnny Quinn, Gene Maday, and Scotty Schettler. Following in their footsteps are Nick Bogdanovich, Jimmy Vaccaro, Richie Baccellieri, Matt Metcalf, and Chris Andrews. They are grand masters of the art. They know how to book. How smart are they? Well, Nick ran the William Hill U.S. sportsbook operation and then oversaw Caesars Sports trading for nearly a decade before being hired as sportsbook manager at Circa. Jimmy is the senior linemaker at the sports-betting network VSiN and vice president of sports marketing at the South Point Hotel, Casino & Spa. Richie B., who ran the counter at the MGM, Caesars, and the Palms, now works as the director of product development at Circa alongside Nick. Chris Andrews, legendary oddsmaker Jack “Pittsburgh Jack” Franzi’s nephew, is the sportsbook director and Jimmy’s sidekick at the South Point, owned and operated by Michael Gaughan, another Las Vegas legend. In 1992, Jack Binion was Nick Bogdanovich’s boss at the Horseshoe. I could bet $25,000 on a game of college football at eight o’clock Monday morning, and $50,000 on a pro football game.

Jack of all trades, master of none, better than a master of one.

You’re lucky. I wish I were so smart.” Maybe then I could graduate early and help my parents that much sooner. “Except I can’t even decide on a major.” “Why not? She blinks. “It’s hard to explain. I’m . . .” She glances away and then back. “I’m a polymath.” “A what now?” “It’s a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning. Someone whose expertise spans a significant number of subject areas. The term itself is a derivative of poly, meaning many, and manthanein, a Greek verb meaning to learn.” I stare at her. “Reese, this is amazing.” She won’t meet my eyes. Instead, she picks up the pillow and holds it in her lap, fidgeting with the fabric at the corner. “You can literally do anything.” “But don’t you see?” Her eyes meet mine, flashing in frustration. “It’s impossible to pick only one thing. Our current global economy is hyperspecialized, while I’m a student of all things but a master of none. My parents are brilliant artists. Scarlett is a brilliant chef. I am more of a jack-of-all-trades. I can’t find any one specific thing I want to learn or excel at above all others.” “Huh. I still can’t see this as a disadvantage. You’re so smart that the sky is the limit.” “But the whole point of college and picking a career is to find that limit. Isn’t it?” “I don’t know.” I never thought about it that way. “I think it’s more than that. It’s about doing something you enjoy, something you feel passionate about.