How to deal with being a jack of all trades, and how to keep on learning

I'm a generalist.

That's the modern term. The older and more known one is "jack of all trades".

I learned all kind of things throughout my life, from graphic design to web development, to 3D modelling to writing, and a lot more.

Now, being a jack of all trades is great because you get to do a bunch of things, and your life rarely gets boring when it comes to work. There's always a new project you can start, and you never limit yourself to one or two activities. If you feel like doing something new, you can just do it, regardless of whether you have any experience in that area or if you know what you're doing or not. You just start learning and see what happens.

But as great and fun as that might be, it also has its disadvantages. For example, I've always been quite jealous of people who just know what they want to do in life, or who have one particular thing they really like doing. Some people absolutely love drawing and do that for their entire life, others want to become programmers, and know that since a young age, others want to become teachers and are sure about it since they're in high school.

I never knew what "my thing" was. It's why I keep on doing all kind of things, trying out new skills as often as I can. But it can sometimes be really tiring and really frustrating, especially when you want to try something new, but you also get bored of everything you start really quickly.

Let me give you some examples. If you want to do graphic design, all you have to do is get Photoshop, watch a few tutorials on YouTube and that's it, you can start working on small projects. However, if you want to create actual cool things, you have to invest several month into learning and practicing.

If you want to learn web development, that's fairly easy. All you have to do is go online and search for tutorials or courses that teach you HTML and CSS. After that you'll at least have to learn JavaScript in order to add some interactivity to your websites. And that's enough to get you started. The bad part is that in order to create some good websites that you'll be really proud of, you'll have to spend quite some time learning and practicing, learning how to use CSS and JavaScript really well, how to make your website responsive, etc.

One final example - 3D modelling. Let's say you want to do that. Again, really easy to start - you download Blender, because it's free and it's great, you go to YouTube, follow some basic tutorials to learn how to get started, and if you follow the doughnut tutorial series made by Blender Guru (Andrew Price) then you'll have a cool finished project at the end of it. But, once again, if you want to create some amazing projects, such as really complex environments or cool characters, you'll have to spend quite a few months, or even a year, learning all kind of things, and practicing a lot.

You see, there's a pattern here. You can start doing pretty much everything you want. All you need are the necessary tools (be it something real or a software on your computer) and some tutorials to teach you the basics. After some time learning those basic concepts, you'll be able to work on some cool projects.

The problem is that if you're like me, you're rarely satisfied with those "cool" projects. You'll always want to do more. You'll always want to be able to work on projects as awesome as those that professionals work on, but in order to do that, you have to spend literally years working on getting better at one particular thing.

You can't draw like Kim Jung Gi after only a few weeks of practice. You can't create environments or characters such as those that you see in triple A video games, like God of War (the new one) or The Witcher 3, or Assassin's Creed Valhalla within a few months of learning. You can't develop incredibly good looking and smart websites with a few month of coding.

You need years of experience to start working on any of those amazing projects. Well, technically you can start working on something like that whenever you want, but it's almost impossible for you to create something as good as a professional who spent years improving and learning his or her craft.

If you're a jack of all trades and you cannot seem to find the one thing that you really enjoy doing, then you'll be doomed, like me, to try out as many things as possible until you find that one thing that you really love, assuming you'll ever find it.

The annoying part is that you'll eventually find one or two things that you'll like more than others, and you'll want to learn more about them, while still learning new skills to keep on trying to find what you "love".

How to balance that? How do you keep on working on those things you really like, while also trying out new stuff? And how do you try new things without getting burned out? How do you keep on learning without getting bored very quickly of anything you start?

Well, here's how I do it - I keep my projects, and my learning sessions, short. Whatever I begin doing, I begin with a fairly simple goal in mind, one that can be achieved very quickly, or with very little work. Preferably, I make sure I always have time for the other 95 things that I enjoy doing.

Examples, again: Fairly recently I came to the realization that I'd like to know a bit more about computers and how they work at a more complex level - how the processor does its thing, how transistors work, how memory works, and so on.

In order to do that, I could've read a book, but that would've been extremely boring. I could've taken a course - also extremely boring, mainly because they are long and... well, boring. What I did instead was search for a YouTube video and to my surprise, I found an entire course, but a fun one, on YouTube, divided into 41 videos, all around 10 minutes long.

Not only was the course quite fun, because it had a lot of animations and everything was explained in an interesting and simple way, but every video was short enough to keep me interested and to allow me to do other things throughout the day. I didn't have to pay a lot of attention to understand what was said, and that was great.

I watched 2 videos a day, and that was it. I finished all the courses in around 20 days, and while I started to get bored by the end of it, the fact that I didn't spend more than 20 minutes learning every day, helped a lot.

It was a really simple way to learn something, it required no more than 20 - 25 minutes every day, and I knew that once I got to video number 41, I was done. While I was busy with the course, I got another interest - hacking.

I found a YouTube channel focused mainly on Hacking, owned by a really cool person, who makes fun videos. So I got interested in that. As soon as I finished the computer science course (which was recently), I started learning about hacking.

I'll watch his videos, which are only a few, and I'll use the website he recommended to finish at least one "course" they have, and once I'm done, I'll move to something else.

The idea is really simple - don't allow yourself to get too bored of the things you do. Come up with a short enough goal that allows you to learn enough, while also avoiding boredom. Getting bored, and powering through it, can make you hate doing that particular thing, like it happened to me with graphic design and web development.

I did the same thing with Excel at the beginning of the year. I watched a 2 hours course, which I divided into 20 - 30 minutes sessions every day, and once I was done with it, I stopped watching Excel tutorials. I got a good understanding of the basics and that was more than enough. By stopping after that course, I kept my interest in Excel fairly high, and I don't get extremely bored and annoyed every time I have to use it (like it happened with Photoshop in the past).

The entire point is to keep yourself entertained and interested in what you're learning. If you get really bored or burned out learning one thing, then you'll probably fail at learning more, then you'll get frustrated, and you'll eventually quit, probably never trying out that thing again. You have to make it fun, and if that involves making really small steps, then do that.

Pick one thing, learn the basics, move on.

If you are still interested after learning the basics, choose another "milestone" and focus on that, but again, keep things short and avoid boredom.

As an example, if you become interested in 3D modelling, learn to do basic things, such as creating, rotating and modifying shapes. If at the end of your learning process you're not particularly interested in more, stop. If you'd like to learn more however, move to something more advanced, such as texturing, but keep it simple and short. Learn the basics of texturing and stop. Still interested? Keep on learning. Bored? Try something else.

There's one final thing I'd like to mention before ending this article - following this strategy will not make you a master at anything. Quite the opposite. But if you have no idea what you want to do in life, then just trying things out for short periods of time is great. Trying something out for a bit, then moving to something else, is, in my opinion, a really good strategy.

If you don't like to do basic 3D modelling, there's no point in forcing yourself to learn everything up to procedural elements and how to work with complex nodes or shapes, because you'll probably end up quitting and wasting your time.

If you don't like to write basic HTML and CSS, then forcing yourself to learn complex CSS and JavaScript code to make your website look and feel modern might be nothing but a boring and tedious process that you'll hate.

If you don't like to experiment with different photo effects, combining shapes to make something cool and playing with colors to make your project look beautiful, then spending hours reading about design theory and learning new tools to improve your work is gonna be horribly boring.

The main point is for you to have fun learning new things. If you have to spend 2 hours convincing yourself to create that 3D table model you need for your scene, or to look at some graphic design work on Pinterest to get some motivation, or to write those 30 new lines of code, then it might be time for you to try something new and take a break from whatever you were doing before, at least for a while. You can always come back to that skill and try it out later, once you got your break.