The Rest Of "Jack Of All Trades" Is Made Up

“Jack of all trades, master of none.”

Go on then. Say the rest of it.

You know the one — “but oftentimes better than a master of one.” It turns up in every comment section within about four replies, always from someone gently explaining that the insult is secretly a compliment and everyone else has been quoting it wrong their whole life.

That version has never been found in print before the 21st century. Somebody made it up, probably in the last fifteen years, and it went viral because people wanted it to be true.

The actual history is much better, and it’s why I wanted to write this.

1612. “Jack of all trades” shows up in Geffray Mynshul’s account of life in a debtors’ prison. No “master of none” attached. A Jack was a capable all-round worker and the phrase carried no real sting.

Early 1700s. The sneer starts creeping in. A 1721 Boston News-Letter has “Jack of all Trades; and it would seem, Good at none.” By 1732 someone’s written that a jack of all trades “is of no trade.”

1785. The exact wording we all know — “a Jack of all trades, and in truth, master of none” — lands in print, in Charles Lucas’s Pharmacomastix. Which is nine years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

2010s. The optimistic tail appears out of nowhere, gets attached to the front half, and starts getting posted as the “original.”

So the phrase meant fine, then it curdled into an insult across the century that ended with the factory, and then it grew a made-up happy ending right around the time everyone started feeling trapped in one lane.

Nobody planned that. The saying just kept getting retrofitted to whatever the economy wanted from people that century.

Which is the actual point. “Should I specialise or stay broad” gets treated like a personality quiz — are you a depth person or a breadth person, what’s your type.

It isn’t. It’s a question about what century you’re standing in.

Societies have flipped their answer several times, hard, and every time it flipped, the people who’d optimised for the old answer got stranded. We might be mid-flip right now — which is the third thing I want to say about social media, after why social media is all highlights and why you’re losing to a person who doesn’t exist.

For almost all of it, everyone did everything

Hunter-gatherer bands were too small to spare anyone. You tracked animals, you knew which plants wouldn’t kill you, you navigated, you made your own tools, you patched up your own injuries.

There was division of labour — by sex, by age, and it shows up in every forager society we know of. But nobody was only one thing. There was no guy who exclusively sharpened spearheads, because a group of thirty people cannot afford that guy.

This is the default setting for our species, and we ran on it for something like 300,000 years.

Farming invented the specialist by accident

Agriculture made spare food. Spare food buys people who don’t make food.

That’s the whole mechanism. Once a village produces more calories than it eats, it can support a potter, a smith, a priest, a soldier, a scribe. Most people stayed generalists for millennia after this — but for the first time, some people didn’t have to be.

A scribe who can’t farm is a genuinely new kind of human being.

The polymath window was short, and it closed for a weird reason

Here’s the bit I had backwards.

I assumed the Renaissance produced polymaths because it was a golden age of curiosity, and that we lost them because modern life made people shallower. Almost the opposite.

Peter Burke, who counted around 500 Western polymaths for his book on them, puts the boom exactly where printing, the New World and the Scientific Revolution collide. Knowledge was arriving fast — but there was still little enough of it that one person could hold a serious amount at once. Leonardo could be a painter and an anatomist and an engineer because the total volume of European anatomy was a shelf, not a library.

Then knowledge kept compounding, and that’s what killed the polymath. Burke describes three “crises of knowledge” since the Middle Ages — Gutenberg, then cheap industrial printing, then the second half of the twentieth century — where each flood of new information pushed people to retreat further into a corner of it.

Polymaths didn’t die out because we got lazier. They died out because there got to be too much to know.

(Also worth saying: the polymaths were elite scholars, not typical people. Renaissance guild craftsmen were specialised to a degree that would embarrass a modern developer. “The Renaissance was an age of generalists” is true about a few hundred famous men and false about basically everyone else.)

Then capitalism did the maths and the maths was brutal

The Wealth of Nations opens, in 1776, with Adam Smith counting pins.

Ten workers, splitting pin-making into eighteen separate operations, produce 48,000 pins a day. Working alone, Smith reckons each might manage one. Not one thousand. One.

That number reorganised the planet. It’s not ideology, it’s arithmetic, and the arithmetic is overwhelming. The deal it offered every worker was simple: go narrow, get paid.

And we took it. For two hundred years, the way to be valuable was to be one of the eighteen operations, and to be better at your operation than the person next to you. By the late twentieth century this had gone about as far as it can go — a PhD is, more or less by construction, knowing almost everything about almost nothing.

Which is fine! That’s how the frontier of knowledge actually moves. But it means a person’s working life became a single ladder, and a single ladder is a fragile thing to own.

Two things are now pulling the other way

AI makes competence outside your lane cheap. Not expertise — competence. The stuff that used to require hiring someone, or three years of study, now often requires an afternoon and good judgment about what you’re looking at. When execution gets cheap, the scarce thing stops being can you do it and becomes do you know what’s worth doing, and can you tell when the output is wrong. That’s a breadth skill. It’s also a taste skill, which is harder to fake than it looks.

Social media shows you the top of every field at once. Which — and this is the connection back to the rest of this series — makes staying in one lane feel like a mistake, constantly. You watch a guy who’s brilliant at a thing you’ve never tried, and it lands as an accusation.

I’m genuinely unsure about this second one. It might be producing more well-rounded people. It might just be producing shiny object syndrome dressed up as ambition: a generation who start twelve things because they saw twelve people who were great at them, and finish none. I don’t have evidence either way, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims they do.

What I’d say is that these two forces point the same direction but for opposite reasons. AI raises the value of breadth. Social media raises the appetite for it. Only one of those is a good reason to change what you’re doing.

Is broad actually better, though?

The most useful framing I’ve found is David Epstein’s, in Range: it depends entirely on whether the thing you’re doing is a kind or a wicked environment.

Kind environments have clear rules, repeating patterns, fast feedback. Chess. Golf. Classical music. Radiology, mostly. Here, early specialisation genuinely wins — there’s a defined game and more reps make you better at it.

Wicked environments have unclear rules, delayed or actively misleading feedback, and situations that don’t repeat. Most business. Most research. Most careers. Most of your life. Here, breadth wins, because the useful move is usually analogical — stealing a solution from a domain that looks nothing like yours.

So the question isn’t “am I a generalist or a specialist.” It’s “is my field kind or wicked?” And most people’s honest answer is wicked, which they then respond to by specialising anyway, because that’s what the last two hundred years told everyone to do.

So what do you actually do

Three things I’ve landed on, and I hold the third one loosely.

Stop treating it as a binary. The realistic target isn’t top 1% at one thing or mediocre at ten. It’s being top-25%-ish at two or three things that combine into something nobody else is doing. Top 25% is achievable with normal effort. Top 1% mostly isn’t, and combinations are rarer than peaks anyway. If you write reasonably well, understand a technical field properly, and can talk to people, you are already a category with very few people in it — and none of those three is a world-class skill.

This is also the direct answer to the composite person from the last essay. You can’t beat the assembled creature; it’s assembled out of everybody’s best. But it has no combinations. It’s just peaks, borrowed from twenty different people who have nothing to do with each other. You can be a shape. It can only be a pile.

Go deep at least once, on purpose. Not for the credential. Because until you’ve been genuinely good at one thing, you don’t know what “good” feels like from the inside, and you’ll keep mistaking the first plateau for the ceiling. Breadth built on top of one real depth is range. Breadth without it is just sampling, and sampling feels productive while going nowhere.

Treat the pull towards breadth with some suspicion. If you’re broadening because execution got cheap and your judgment is now the bottleneck, good, that’s the world actually changing. If you’re broadening because you saw someone excellent at something and felt behind, that’s not a strategy, that’s social media doing what it’s designed to do. Same behaviour, two completely different causes, and only you can tell which one is yours.

The era is shifting. That’s real, and I think broadly good — being a cog was never much of a deal for the cog. But “the world now rewards generalists” is being used to justify a lot of aimless starting, and history’s answer keeps changing, so whichever way you go, hold it lightly. The people who got stranded in every previous flip were the ones who thought the current answer was the permanent one.

Part 3 of three. Part 1: Does Social Media Make Us Narcissistic? · Part 2: You’re Comparing Yourself To A Person Who Doesn’t Exist

Sources

• Forager division of labour: Marlowe, Hunting and Gathering: The Human Sexual Division of Foraging Labor, Cross-Cultural Research, 2007
• Polymaths, their boom and decline: Peter Burke, The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag, Yale University Press, 2020
• The pin factory: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 1, 1776
• Kind vs wicked environments: David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, 2019
• Phrase history: Jack of all trades (Wikipedia, on the modern origin of the “master of one” tail) and Jack Of All Trades (Phrase Finder, on the 1612 and 1785 attestations)