In the perfect society, wrote Karl Marx, nobody would be a specialist. It would be "possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow - to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." (The quote comes from his 1845 book Theses On Feuerbach, shortly to be republished, in a new translation by Paul McKenna, as I Can Transform Your Capitalist Relations Of Production In Seven Days.) There's nothing particularly Marxist about this idea - you find it, of course, in ancient Greece, and in the Renaissance - but where you don't find it is in the business section of your local chain bookshop. There, by contrast, the focus is on focus: defining your "purpose", relentlessly pursuing your "number one priority", and developing your "personal brand". Specialism rules.
The problem is, plenty of people don't have one number-one priority, even within the world of work. From an early age, we're taught to feel this is bad, a mark of indecisiveness - a belief exacerbated not just by reading stress-inducing business books, but by the very notion of a single, unitary "career path". "The conventional wisdom [seems] indisputable," writes Barbara Sher, whose excellent book What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything? has made her chief consoler of self-pitying generalists everywhere. "If you're a jack-of-all-trades, you'll always be a master of none. You'll become a dilettante, a dabbler, a superficial person - and you'll never have a decent career."
Sher identifies a specific personality type she calls "scanners" and offers them (at barbarasher.com) a plethora of tips for flourishing in a non-scanner world; another recent book, One Person/Multiple Careers by Marci Alboher, gathers examples of people who have made a success of what the author calls "slash" careers. The unifying theme is how much damage is done by the mere belief, among generalists, that specialism is best. "Almost every case of low self-esteem, shame, frustration ... simply disappeared the moment they understood they were scanners, and stopped trying to be someone else," Sher reports.
Apart from anything else, the "one focus" belief serves to inhibit action: if you believe you have to give up your job as a lawyer in order to become a screenwriter - because people have to have one job - you'll probably never become a screenwriter. If you spend one hour actually screenwriting, you already are one.
Most of us, of course, have jobs to do, and a life outside our jobs to attend to; there's a limit to how much more we can cram in. But we can start by letting go of the idea that specialism is inherently superior. (In some fields, it's still better-paid, but Alboher marshals evidence that this is changing.) How strange that we should have persuaded ourselves that doing only a few of the things we can do is better than doing lots of them. As for that "jack-of-all-trades" thing: the first published reference to Shakespeare - hardly an underachiever - refers to him using the Elizabethan equivalent of that term.
Another famous dilettante: Leonardo da Vinci. I'm just saying.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
