Ramblings of a drunken monkey

Part 2: Jack of all trades

Master of none, as the phrase goes, and it is generally how I have lived my life. The first major pivotal point in my education was my first degree, a BSc in biology; I'm not saying that what came before that was a waste of time but in many cases I didn't have much of a choice or the choice was fairly easy. My GCSE's were what I was told to do, about the only choice I had was German over French, and that was a no-brainer for me. My A Levels were chosen to fit the degree course I wanted to take so again an obvious choice, meaning no real choice at all. It was my degree that really set me on a career path going forward. Unfortunately I didn't consider that when I did it. As with most of my hobbies before, I studied what I loved most and that was the natural world, but the thing about doing a general biology degree (which they don't really tell you in school) is that anyone who does a more specialised degree than you is instantly more qualified. When I came out of university I started to look for jobs, but anything to do with plants preferred to hire a plant biologist or botanist than a biologist. Anything with animals preferred a zoologist, to do with the sea, a marine biologist, and so on. And so I ended up underqualified by knowing more breadth of subjects than my competition. I ended up working as a contaminated soil and water tester in a lab, interestingly throughout my education I'd vowed never to become what I called 'a lacky in a lab', so you can see the irony with this point in my life. Interestingly this work was a real help to me when I did start my first proper job but eleven months was enough to push me to do more and get better things for my life.

My next step was to do a masters degree in soil science, which might seem like an odd jump but I'd been taught about the above ground stuff (plants, animals, fungus) and also the deeper stuff like genetics, so I decided that in order to understand the deeper side I needed to know the substrate everything lived in and on. The 'material' aspect of our living world. Ok this isn't entirely true, the soil and substrate is as much a living ecosystem as any but it was simply an aspect I wanted to learn more about. Funny thing is that my masters was also a 'general degree', teaching me everything from erosion control, slope stability and the impact of rainfall on the ground, to hydrology, ploughing techniques and habitat creation. The saving grace was that it was a masters degree and so was considered of a high enough level to be valuable. It landed me my first job as an environmental consultant, where I continued as a general specialist, doing every role a graduate could do (because there was only two of us and a shed load of work to be done). Here I learned how to supervise a drilling rig and log and sample soil, how to extract water from a well, how to do bat surveys, hedgerow and tree surveys and noise measurement. My list of skills and experience is as diverse as it is long but each one has taught me something new, given me some insight into the world we live in and made me who I am.

I could have specialised early on; my friend went into project management and has done very well, but I chose to stay technical, I'm more hands-on than book keeping. I eventually went into acoustics and asbestos management but I am still available to dig holes if people need me, even ten years on. What this means is that if people ask my opinion I can give them multiple points of view, multiple considerations and all are from experience. I find that I still do this in my Chinese medicine therapies, a more recent tangent of my education and training but one that has brought me rapidly to the ponderings within these pages. If someone comes to me with a problem then I could just use massage, or, if that's not appropriate I would have to send them somewhere else. But I can also do acupuncture, cupping, bloodletting, energy healing and acoustic healing and so I am able to use any and even all of these methods to help someone to heal.

I am, and will always be a jack of all trades, but I am a master of enough to make a difference in the world. Don't be afraid not to specialise too early, just be prepared to be overtaken at the start by those who are more specific than you.

My advice would be not to tell your kids or colleague or yourself off for trying something for a month and then dropping it, provided something valuable has been learned from the experience. Or for doing course after course after course. Maybe the person has not found where they need to be, or maybe each time they do something they build themselves to be something immense in the end.

Instead of criticising or dismissing such people as flaky, maybe talk with them and watch them as them grow and become who they are really meant to be. There are vital skills that are learned whenever we try something new, and it's those skills that make us who we are. We may only do something for five minutes but if a cog inside us clicks into place then five minutes is all we may need. You could argue that if someone has been doing the same thing for many years then they either love it very much, or they haven't learned what they need to learn. Variation and versatility make us strong; the ability to adapt and deal with anything that is put in front of us helps us to survive and grow. Those people who resist something new because they like it their way, or don't want to try it because it's different will never grow beyond the boundaries they set for themselves. If you live without boundaries, where anything is an option, then you have no limitations for growth and evolution to something exciting.