Master of None, and Fine With It

Jack of all trades, master of none.

You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. Everyone’s heard it, usually delivered with a sympathetic head tilt, as if being curious about more than one thing were a mild medical condition.

The lesson behind it is simple: pick one thing and do it over and over until you’re the best at it. Then that becomes your identity, your career, and eventually the thing they say at your funeral. Society loves this idea because it builds the fundamentals. Pick one, repeat it, call it a life.

It never quite sat well with me. Even before I learned that the saying doesn’t actually stop there. The full version goes: jack of all trades, master of none, but often better than master of one.

Funny how nobody quotes the second half.

The people who stayed

I grew up surrounded by people who did one thing their whole lives and were happy with it. Others tried their hand at a few things, found the one they were good at, and stuck with it. Nothing wrong with either. It just never looked like me.

And these days, passion gets a lot of airtime. Follow your passion! It’s wonderful advice if you happen to run into one. Most people don’t, and I’m one of them. I’ve never felt burning, all-consuming passion for any single thing. What I have is curiosity, about a lot of things, which is less poetic and doesn’t fit on a motivational poster.

So I follow that instead. Doing the same thing over and over for the better part of my life honestly scares me a little.

Where it’s taken me

Curiosity has taken me travelling, up mountains and under the sea. It put skis on my feet. Most recently, it made me build complete software for my operations with no idea how, purely because I wanted to see how that even happens. (Turns out you just start, get things wrong, and keep going.)

None of it was a plan. Each one was just a hmm, what’s that like? that I refused to ignore.

The photo

Now curiosity has landed on aviation, and I’ve realised it’s not new.

When I was ten, my uncle, who was in the Indian Navy and posted at Uchipuli airport down south, took me and my cousins to see the place. At some point somebody sat me in a helicopter’s captain seat and took a picture. Small kid, enormous seat, looking like he owned the place.

That photo got framed. I still have it.

I never thought much about it. But I read somewhere that all roads eventually lead back to the interests you had as a child, and sitting here, I think that’s true. Somewhere between that seat and now, a kid decided he wanted to fly, and then spent decades quietly collecting every other adventure first. In my case, I had a lot of interests. The helicopter just got there before the others.

So that’s the next stop. I’m going to learn to fly.

Reaching the end of the rope

It’s been five years since I started scuba diving, and I think I’m reaching the end of the rope in this career. It doesn’t excite me the way it used to. I’m not curious to explore more of it, not the way I am about learning to fly a plane, spending a couple of years in the Nordics, or building a wooden cabin in the woods and growing my own food.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just what happens when a curious person runs out of questions in one place. You go find a new one.

The cat

Passion isn’t for me in this life. I’m going to keep choosing curiosity, again and again, and see where it takes me.

Which brings me back to the cat. Curiosity killed the cat. Everybody loves that line. It’s the go-to warning for anyone about to try something new. But people cut idioms short and then keep warning you with half of one. The full thing goes: curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

The cat, by the way, is doing great.

I’ll take the satisfaction.