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Jack

On any given day, how much information do you consume? How many blog posts? How many videos? How many podcasts?

How much of that information is on the same five subjects?

In a world where we are flooded day in and day out by the aggregate sum of human knowledge, you would think that we would have more interesting things to look at than five more articles about Social Media marketing.

Oddly enough, those of us who work on the web rarely do.

We’re becoming a society that learns deeply, not broadly. We’re becoming a society of hyper-specialists, constantly racing to keep ahead of a curve that never ends. Content is so easy to produce, so easy to re-purpose that by the time you think you’re an expert in your chosen field, you’re already five steps behind.


Master Of None

We’re chasing a moving target and we’re losing.

Programmers always have new libraries to play with, designers new techniques to master, marketers new trends to follow and everyone one more blog post to read. While this is how it has always been, the difference is that where once you would have to wait months if not years for a new book to come out to fill the holes in your knowledge, now you have access to a constant stream of new information, packaged and delivered every day without fail.

When change is measured in time it takes your feed reader to refresh, how can you really catch up?

The result is that we’re saturated. Few of us have the time to expand our knowledge into other domains because so much of it is committed to chasing down relevancy. While there is something to be said about focusing on the niche that you spend the most time in, how much is lost when we forget that a big part of creativity is drawing connections between subjects that on the surface seem unrelated?

How many great engineers drew their inspiration from art? How many great musicians found their muse in science or history? How much are we losing when we think that the sum total of all human experience can be whittled down to whatever micro-field happens to pay our bills this month?

Worse, what happens when that micro-field that you have spent years building expertise in disappears? The world is changing quickly, industries rise and fall like the tides, do you really think that your job description will exist in its current state in 5 years? 10?

How many of us are working towards our own obsolescence?

The old adage goes that a Jack of all trades is a master of none. This is mostly true, but it’s equally important to note that if you plan on being a Jack of one trade, you better know for a fact that your trade is here to stay.

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