Jack (of All Trades) and the Wolf

Jack (of All Trades) and the Wolf

One day of peace and quiet before being swarmed with work again. There'll be lots of people in town next week, so I'll be thoroughly occupied with meetings, dinners and boozing sessions. Look's like there's even more work in the pipeline for me in July and August.

Well, I shouldn't be complaining. It's good to be busy; whenever there's a slight lull between jobs, I tend to get lazy or become distracted by more interesting things. I must not let my momentum slacken.

Even though I am a bit of a reluctant IT professional, I must still make an effort to better myself and improve my knowledge in the field. The only problem is, I dislike specialization. I get easily bored if I find myself being pigeonholed into one small area.

Question: can one make a living as an IT consultant by being a jack of all trades and master of none? Hmm...I don't know. The conventional wisdom is that one must specialize.

I read an article about e-mail being so useful because it is such a multi-purpose application. I'm sure many of us use our e-mail as a crude archival system, a file transfer utility and a blogging tool, to name a few--even though there are better utilities for performing these functions.

There's also a handyman in my neighbourhood whom I call whenever I have any problems with things in my house--it could be a broken TV, a leaking roof, a tree that needs trimming or a clogged drain, Mr Fix-it will come and take care of it. I am quite happy to pay him whatever he asks for because he does such a good job. I also admire Harvey Keitel's character, The Wolf, in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

Maybe subconsciously I am just emulating their business model.