Jack of All Trades

Someone called me a jack of all trades, master of nothing once. We were in a room with a client who had huge problems and concerns, and she had brought me in to fix it. She meant it as a compliment. She was telling the client that I was the person who could walk into any situation and start making it better. But all I heard was "master of nothing." And I carried that for a long time.

Jack of all trades, master of none. That's the version most people know. And for a long time, that's where I stopped. You're good at a lot of things, but you're not great at anything. You're useful, but you're not exceptional. You can be dropped into any situation and figure it out, but you'll never be the expert in the room.

What I didn't know then, and what I wish someone had told me, is that the full quote doesn't end there. The whole thing goes: "Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."

I could have saved myself a lot of years of feeling like I wasn't enough if I'd heard that second half sooner.

My entire professional life has been built on a very specific skill that doesn't really have a name. I get dropped into things that are broken, behind, or stuck, and I figure out just enough to start moving. I don't need to understand 100% of something to begin. I never have. I need to understand enough to see the shape of the problem, enough to ask the right questions, enough to start pulling the thread. And then I pull.

I've been a firefighter my whole career. Not the kind with a truck. The kind that shows up when a process isn't working, when a team is behind, when something is falling apart and nobody can figure out why. I come in, I assess, I fix, I build, I get it moving. And then, usually, I move on to the next thing.

I've been loyal to companies. I've stayed in the same place for years at a time. But roles have never really been my thing. There was a running joke at one point about all my little hats, because every time I switched tasks or picked up a new responsibility, it was like I was putting on a different hat. Product hat. Operations hat. Technology hat. Customer hat. Compliance hat. Sometimes three hats stacked on top of each other.

I'm a consummate learner. I love learning about new things. But I'm not a specialist. I look at people who specialize and I think they're incredible. Developers, architects, engineers, people who have this deep well of knowledge in one domain and they know everything about it. Their knowledge is in one cup, and that cup is full.

Mine looks more like a ping pong table covered in cups, each one with a different amount in it. Mortgage operations. Product management. Compliance. Data. Process design. Technology. Customer experience. Leadership. A little of this, a lot of that, more of some than others, and always adding new ones.

The nature of my brain is that it's always thinking. And not about one thing. About many things, simultaneously, on multiple levels. It's like having a browser with thirty tabs open, each one working on something different. Sometimes one of them is playing audio and I can't figure out which one. You know that meme. That's me.

It's chaotic. It's messy. It's also, somehow, how I've built my entire career.

Because here's the thing about having all those tabs open: I can see connections between them. I can look at a problem in operations and see how it relates to a technology limitation. I can look at a customer complaint and trace it back to a process gap three departments away. I can sit in a room with developers and translate what they're saying into something a C-suite executive can act on, and then turn around and take the executive's priority and translate it back into something the developers can build.

I understand scale. I can look at something small and see how it gets big, or look at something big and see where it needs to get small. I've never really known what to call that other than the thing that makes me useful.

My interest in AI didn't start with models or code or anything that sounds impressive. It started with documents and data.

In mortgage, you spend an absurd amount of time looking at a document, extracting a piece of data, then looking at another document, extracting another piece of data, then making sure those two pieces of data match. Over and over and over. Across hundreds of documents per loan. Across thousands of loans per month.

And my brain just kept thinking: why can't something just read all the documents, pull all the data, and tell the person where to look? Why are we asking humans to do the thing that humans are worst at, which is staring at numbers for eight hours and not making a mistake?

That's where it started. Not with a vision of the future. With a very practical frustration about the present. And when I realized I didn't have enough knowledge to solve the problem myself, I went back to school. I got my bachelor's degree, then my master's in AI. Not because I wanted a career change. Because at that moment, staring at that problem, I needed to know more. Hit a wall, go learn what's on the other side of it. That's the pattern. My entire career has been about using our people better. Making a better mousetrap. Looking at how something works and asking whether there's a way to make it work faster, smarter, with less pain for the person doing it.

I'm wired for that. Whether my customer is internal or external, I want to make things better for them. That's the thread that connects every role I've ever had, every hat I've ever worn, every cup on that ping pong table.

And now, a few years into my AI journey, something has shifted in how I think about the jack of all trades thing.

I think the future belongs to people like me.

Not because I'm special. Because the nature of the work is changing. The specialists are still essential. The deep knowledge still matters. But the person who can sit between all the domains, who can understand enough about each one to move intelligently between them, who can see the connections and translate across boundaries, that person is about to become the most valuable person in the room.

Because that's exactly what working with AI requires.

When I sit down with Claude Code and build a system, I'm not writing code the way a developer writes code. I'm bringing the context. I built a tool recently that pulls data from documents, compares it across sources, and flags the discrepancies for a human to review. To build that, I didn't need to be a master of Python. I needed to understand the documents. I needed to understand the data. I needed to understand the regulations around it. I needed to understand what the person using the tool actually needs to see. And then I needed to communicate all of that clearly enough that the model could do the technical work alongside me.

All those cups on the table? They're not a weakness anymore. They're the whole point.

I think about my career and I see a straight line that I couldn't see while I was living it. The firefighting. The hat switching. The constant learning. The refusal to settle into one lane. The instinct to connect things that other people see as separate. The ability to walk into a room full of specialists and be the person who ties their work together into something that actually ships.

All of that was preparation for this. I just didn't know what I was preparing for.

And I think there are a lot of people out there who are wired the same way. People who've been told they're scattered, or unfocused, or that they need to pick a lane. People who have thirty browser tabs open and can't figure out which one is playing music. People who know a little about a lot and have spent their careers feeling like that's a limitation rather than an advantage.

It's not a limitation. Not anymore. Maybe it never was.

Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

I used to hear that and flinch. Now I hear it and think: that's the job description for the future.

The masters will always matter. But the people who can see across domains, who can learn fast, who can connect the dots between things that don't obviously belong together, who can sit down with an AI and bring the full, messy, multidimensional context of a real problem, those are the people who are going to thrive in what's coming.

And here's the funny thing. After a lifetime of never wanting to master one thing, I've finally found the one thing I want to chase. Working with AI. Nobody's going to master it. The technology changes so fast, so constantly, that the finish line moves every single day. You wake up and the thing you understood yesterday works differently today. There is no done. There is no arriving.

And that's exactly why it feels like mine.

Because chasing it means staying curious, staying flexible, staying willing to throw out what you knew and start again. It means thirty browser tabs open, a ping pong table full of cups, and a lifetime of practice at learning just enough to move.

I've been training for this my whole life. I just didn't know it until now.