The list of skills I’ve picked up and discarded, or merely fiddled with, over the course of my life is rather long. When I was twelve I studied slight-of-hand with a local magician and quickly developed enough skill to stage small magic shows outside the local grocery store (I wore my father’s college graduation gown as a cape), but I hung up my wand by the time I turned thirteen. Around that time I picked up the guitar and took lessons for several months before moving on to what I thought were more important things (girls, primarily, though someone should have told me at the time that girls like guitarists). I’ve owned guitars ever since, and have one propped on a stand in my living room that I noodle with now and then, but my skill level stabilized around the eighth grade and hasn’t gone anywhere since. I’ve studied French, German, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Hebrew, and Icelandic and developed enough of a vocabulary and accent in each to hold small, elementary-level conversations — but I’ve never pushed on to fluency in any of them. I’ve worked in sales, as a barista, a chef, a restauranteur, an English teacher, a database manager, a producer… The list goes on.
I’m tempted to say that the list is embarrassingly long — except I’m not embarrassed, at least not anymore. “Jack of all trades, master of none,” my father used to lecture me, and it’s true that without sustained focus and discipline nothing of substance can ever be mastered. Maybe I’ve missed out on the thrill of being really, deeply good at one or two things, but every one of the pursuits I named above, and many more besides, were a joy for me to study and dig into and I regret exactly none of them.
Sometime in my forties I made a shaky peace with the idea that maybe the one thing I’m really good at is learning a little bit about a lot of things. That capacity has kept me flexible and curious, passionate and engaged, seeking to find the next thing around every corner and delighted when I discover something new that captures my interest.
So, maybe there’s a parallel world in which I’m happily chattering in fluent Russian and playing masterful classical guitar while snapping off close-up magic tricks on the side. That guy sounds pretty cool to spend some time with, but the problem is he doesn’t exist. The guy who does exist is me. Sloppy, amateurishly polymathematical, and a bit of fun to chat with at cocktail parties because no matter what your field of study or simple curiosity might be there’s a decent chance I know something about it and if I don’t, well, I’m very interested in what you know that I don’t because it may very well become my next thing — at least for the next six months or so.