A book for anyone who has been told to pick one thing — and suspects that was bad advice.
Twenty-six short chapters on breadth, competence, and what starting over actually costs. By Jasen Y. Tham.
A jack of all trades, master of none.
Three words, added in 1785 by a man losing an argument about pharmacists, to a phrase that had meant the opposite since 1612.
The edit held. Two and a half centuries later it is still repeated — most often by the people it was aimed at, usually before anyone has asked.
This book takes the phrase back.
The argument
Four claims the book makes
01The distance from nothing to competent is far shorter than anyone admits. Most of what looks like talent is the first fortnight.
02There is a level called enough. It sits well below mastery, and it is where most of a life’s useful work actually happens.
03Only someone who has stood briefly in many fields can recognise the masters they will never become.
04Every field charges at the door, and the currency is humiliation — the small kind, paid in front of someone who has already paid it.
Read a page
The specialists of Alexandria are not remembered. That is not a sneer at them, and it does not mean they were fools. Most of their work was better than his in its own domain.
But the thing that survives with a name attached, the thing everyone still knows, is a measurement made by the man they called second.
They are the ones who told us he was Beta. We have forgotten which of them was Alpha.
Chapter II — Beta
Contents
Six parts, twenty-six chapters
I — The Accusation
- Seventeen Eighty-Five
- Beta
- The Cage With No Bars
- What Do You Do?
II — Learning
- The Cost of Entry
- The Shortest Distance
- Which Next
- Where the Slope Flattens
- Enough
- The Dead End
III — The Wide Life
- Every Water
- The Euphoric Part
- The Late Hour
IV — Building
- The Wall That Stands Anyway
- No One’s Permission
- The First Sale
- The Bill
- What Is Kept
V — Assembly
- What Good Looks Like
- A Table of Strangers
- The Shared Thing
- The Line
VI — The Account
- One Bay, Forty Years
- The Ones Who Stayed
- The Ledger
- Many Arts
Editions