Transcript
Today’s video topic is really just a rumination, a ramble, if you will. Essentially I’m just trying to work through an idea, or a notion, or a … a “wondering” maybe. A musing even. Yes I meant do that. Don’t doubt! It may have something to do with personality or maybe being happy, which is what a lot of rumination is all about.
There are a lot of facets in our tabletop hobby. Which means there are a lot of things to excel at. Just like in life – everything’s a fractal, the seed of the whole contained in every part. That’s also the structure of a hologram, right? And our universe might be a hologram … ooh.
Well, anyway, back to the point: for a good two thirds of my life, I firmly believed that one of the coolest phrases or labels was “jack of all trades”. Conveniently disregarding the flip side of that particular coin: master of none.
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we try to figure ourselves out by examining the tabletop hobby as an example. And we thank our patrons for their fearless support of such random endeavors. Muchas gracias!
When I was a kid dreading bedtime cause I wanted to keep reading whatever book I was reading – I was always super jealous of kids in the movies who had awesome bedrooms designed by art directors and read their books with flashlights under the blankets – I’d just get caught – at some point I encountered the term “Jack of All Trades” and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
A couple of my heroes back then were Han Solo – duh – and John Bender – also duh – and I’ve always had this jack of all trades thing in the back of my mind as something really cool to be. It really, I understand now, sorta became a subconscious thing that resonated with my penchant for liking or being interested in a lot of different things.
Now in our various niches in the tabletop hobby, there are so many things to do, to get good at, to master. Game mastering, for instance. Or writing, or miniature painting, terrain building, strategy, storytelling, mapmaking, illustration, publishing, design, music, special effects, photography even. I mean, the list just kinda keeps on going and with the democratization of technologies, there’s no end in sight. There’s 3d sculpting and printing, dice manufacturing, woodworking, playing card design, game design, there’s just a ton of stuff. And that’s just one niche!
If you’re like me – which is not recommended – you really dig the top tier artists and producers out there. You not only appreciate and marvel at their stunning craftsmanship and talent but you harbor a desire in your black heart to produce something of a similar quality. But you also come to realize – whether through age or experience or both – the tremendous amount of skill and focus required to achieve such levels of artistic success. And I don’t mean financial success, that’s a whole different ball of wax, I just mean successfully creating masterful works of art that people enjoy.
And being a jack of all trades is kind of not just an impediment but almost antithetical to this kind of achievement.
Now, I’m not saying that, say, Angel Giraldez isn’t good at anything except painting miniatures. Or Joe McCullough is only great at writing games. Or Matt Mercer is only good at DMing … and voice acting. Not at all. What I am saying is that it’s a somewhat safe assumption – is there such a thing as a “safe” assumption? i don’t think so – I think think it’s a somewhat safe assumption that these folks have sunk a disproportionate number of hours into that “thing” that they’ve mastered. And that’s awesome.
But a jack of all trades is also a master of none. As much as I’ve wanted to be a Sergio Calvo of miniature painting or a Brennan Lee Miller of DMing or a Coen Brother of directing or a Chivo Lubezki of cinematography or a William Gibson of writing, et cetera, et cetera, I’m highly unlikely to become a “master” of anything.
And that’s okay, despite the periodic bouts of frustration and empty wishful thinking. This is mostly because of two factors: my inherent laziness and my unwillingness to focus on one thing for an exorbitant amount of time. This doesn’t mean I COULDN’T put in those ten thousand hours of practice on a singular endeavor, I certainly could. I just make a decision, either consciously or unconsciously, every day NOT to. Every time I think about it, I’m like, well, yeah, I could go do that for ten hours today but then I couldn’t do this stuff over here or that stuff over there. Or at least I’d have to put that stuff off for a few years.
And yet … I still WISH I could paint or write or build a masterpiece!
There are certainly advantages to the jack of all trades skillset. If we were to look at life through the lens of an RPG, for example, it’s hard to argue that having a wide array of lower scored skills on the character sheet is a waste of XP. But it’s equally hard to ignore the meteoric rise potential of having a super high ability score in a particular skill or two.
I think what I’ve come to realize about life is that … wait for these awesome words of wisdom, savor the moment … here they come … The grass is always greener – over there.
It always is. That’s our perception anyway.
Do I wish from time to time that I had otaku-level focus on just one thing, one discipline, one creative outlet I could turn into mountains of high praise, commercial success and adoration from legions of fans? And critics? Absolutely, from time to time.
But I also enjoy being interesting in lots of things. Even though I know that sorta keeps me in the realm of “master of nothin’.” Lately, however, I’ve been discovering I can do some things I always actively “believed” I could never or would never be able to do. That’s another interesting side effect of the jack of all trades thing. But also just the everyday “you never know until you try” thing.
In fact, I wanna point out something about the word “belief”. If you classify a thought as a “belief”, by the very nature of the word, you’re installing some rigid psychic limits in your mind that are easy to forget are simply self-constructed. I try to be very conscious of when and how I use the word “belief”, because classifying something as a belief makes it difficult to change, even though, by its very nature, it means something that isn’t necessarily provable, and therefor possibly incorrect or maybe just NOT infallible.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand – typically you gotta try something a few times to really see if you can get the hang of something. I mean, essentially you can learn to do anything given enough time and enough practice. Of course, liking something or some activity in and of itself goes a long way towards helping one weather that initial storm of “I want to do this but I suck at it” feeling.
As a personal example, I remember TO THIS DAY being at my school desk in first grade. At Our Lady of Perpetual Help elementary school in Indio, California, where yes, it was a 110 degrees outside in the spring time. My teacher was Sister Adrian and in the month of October she handed all of us first graders big sheets of colored craft paper. The assignment was: draw a picture for Halloween. I loved Halloween, just like you do. And I remember looking at that paper and KNOWING the image I wanted to draw. A creepy haunted house with a giant moon behind it. With like broken windows and curtains streaming in the breeze and crooked shingles and a twisted wrought iron gate. And I got out my crayons and I started to draw. And I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to translate the idea in my thought-cage to that piece of paper.
Anyway, my drawing was a stupid first grader’s stick figure version of a house. I thoroughly hated it. Really what I hated was my own lack of ability. At the end of the day, Sister Adrian showed off everyone’s pictures one at a time, holding them up so we could all see ‘em. And some of them were super cool to my six year old eye and I was just filled with frustration. From that point on I just got it in my head that I simply could not “do art”.
Some four and half decades later, sitting around one day, I drew a cactus in my notebook. I don’t know why. It seemed like an easy thing to sketch out I guess. And that little cactus kinda shocked me. So I drew another one. And another.
Now I still don’t know anything about how to draw, but look at what I’ve been doing, doodling-wise. Yeah, lotta books and plants in pots. And recently I started drawing random weird medieval weapons. I’m not thinking about anything in particular – least of all “realism” – I’m just doodling, cause it’s a great little stress reliever and I like the way these pens I found feel on this particular paper I’ve got. And every time, I’m a little bit amazed that I drew something “readable”, like, you can tell what it is.
I don’t know thing one about illustration and even though I’ve always kind of wanted to “be an illustrator” – or more accurately – “be able to paint or draw a picture that doesn’t look like a first grader did it”, I know I don’t have the ten thousand hours to put into just this one thing in order to, you know, get good. I got too many other interests. And distractions.
So jack of all trades it is for me. I have no idea what this topic might mean for you, but I just wanted to chat about it. Just like there are so many facets to our hobby, there are many facets to life. If you wanna be a master of one – or some – you gonna get focused, you gonna put in the mileage, and you gonna get good. Or if you’re happy doing all the things, do ‘em all!
So let me know what you think of all this. I mean, besides the whole “Get on with the hobby stuff, man!”
See ya!