You Should Be a Jack-of-All-Trades

July 4th, 2020

If there’s anything I’ve learned during my time here at Jump, it’s that you should never really pigeonhole yourself into one discipline. On one hand, I’m working on some cool tech that is foundational to high frequency trading, but on the other hand, it’s just as important to understand how this affects the bigger picture. These set of experiences have made me wonder whether it’s really a viable strategy to be specialized in one thing. Personally, it sounds very limiting in the things that I can do. Hear me out.

“Ikigai” is the Japanese concept referring to the “reason for being.” If you google this concept you’ll find a cool venn-diagram that looks something like this:

You can see that there are overlaps for passion, mission, profession, and vocation, as well as some sub-overlaps that refer to things that bring some feelings of dissatisfaction. For example, one can do what they love, what they’re good at and what the world needs, but if there is no money, then there is definitely some uneasiness. Many of us will probably go through these phases and a few of us will be privileged enough to really have it all. For the most part our life is full of trade-offs in many ways. I think the concept of Ikigai is great. However, I believe that the idea is kind of narrow-minded in some sense. I think rather than being good at one thing that you can get paid for, you should adopt a diverse skill-set to the point that you are good at many things and have depth in these fields. Entrepreneurs are usually the few people who can immense depth with a variety of things and this is simply because they have to learn to survive.

Humans are amazingly adaptable creatures. Our ability to adjust to our environments in times of ridiculous hardship is what has allowed us to thrive on the planet for many years (not really that long in the grand scheme of things; our time is coming soon enough lol). While it may suffice for one to figure out one thing that they are good at, I think it’s pretty short-sighted to only focus on one thing that they are good at. Learning should be a constant process and problem solving should become a habit. In today’s day and age we have a ridiculous amount of resources at our fingertips. Not exploiting this abundance of information would be a true disservice to the things that we could further accomplish.

I also believe that limiting yourself to being good at just one thing is kind of boring. Life is a constant process of figuring things out and coming up with inventive ways to solve day-to-day problems. As the world becomes more and more diverse with the problems that arise, we also need to be able to pivot accordingly. Pigeonholing yourself with only one skillset will prove to become troublesome if your job no longer exists due to internal issues or even automation. The world is constantly evolving and changing.

I cannot speak to other disciplines, but from what I do see in the tech world, there are many engineers who focus on being good at one specific subfield. I think it’s great to get some depth in that subspace and figure things out but engineers and tech workers should always be on their toes to pivot to new ideas that can do the job even better. Furthermore, the rapid growth of computing and technology also necessitates proper ethical enforcement. In my opinion, having a bunch of computer engineers and scientists will not solve world’s problems on their own. We need HCI specialists, sociologists, and psychologists to understand the implications and effects of the technology that we are building. An engineer should be well versed in the technical details of their project as well as its economical, social, and historical impact. If we cannot have a well-balanced understanding of these aspects, then we will be forcing humans to adapt to the technology at a rate that will remove humanity in its essence. Technology should be complimentary to the day-to-day lives that we live. It’s not impossible to ask someone to have depth or at least some awareness in all these important aspects.

This article bounced around a lot of things, but I think that our generation is going to have be more versatile than ever. There will be periods of immense unrest as well as a fundamental restructuring in the power hierarchy that has been in place in this world for many years. The future will be more democratized and the rapid growth in technology will require people to either adapt or die. There’s no middle ground. We can’t half-ass this growth, but we can certainly do everything we can to make sure that everyone is on board. Just a thought. This is all just the start.