Jack of All Trades, Master of None

I hadn’t ever heard this phrase until my first year of college. My drum teacher, slightly annoyed that I was going to miss another drum lesson because I was singing in a jazz festival, used it as a warning: “Specialize now, or always be sub-par”. Until then I had prided myself in being a multi-instrumentalist. I kept busy learning any instrument I could get my hands on as well as learning sound engineering and the basics of carpentry building makeshift recording studios. True I could do a lot of things, but I wasn’t ‘great’ at any of them. Was I ruining my chances of excelling at one instrument by spreading my time between many? This brought me to the big question: Is being a “Jack of All Trades” really such a bad thing?

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