Contrary to popular imagination, starting a new small business does not always involve waltzing around in a sharp pin-stripe talking to venture capitalists about start-up funding.
Instead, it quite often involves long evenings hunched over books and magazines, or topping up on facial radiation in front of your computer screen, learning about topics which may have seemed unimaginable, even unpronounceable to your former self. Not many of us understood double-entry bookkeeping, tax law, health and safety regulation or search engine optimisation before starting our businesses, but we sure as hell had to learn them. Sure, there’s a subset of entrepreneurs who are happy to farm out as much as possible to the specialists, but as I’ve argued before, even if you can afford it, you’ll be a much more effective manager if you can understand what the specialists are actually doing.
The dying art of versatility, or the ability to quickly and effectively turn your hand and mind to almost anything, is hugely under appreciated in our ‘specialist’ society, where you’re either an ‘expert’ or ‘guru’ in one particular field, or you’re nobody. It’s a common criticism of national education systems – that kids are forced to specialise too early, and that this forced specialisation is pushed up the chain through school, further education, higher education and even on to research level studies. The result is a professional community where we highly prize in-depth knowledge within a very narrow field of expertise.
But starting and running your own business requires a multitude of skills and expertise and that’s why I think being a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ is a great character basis for a small business person.
Of course, I would think that since I consider myself a bit of a polymath. In fact, I’ve recently come to accept that it’s my defining characteristic along with curiosity about the world and a desire to learn (concepts that are so intertwined that they are probably a prerequisite to mastering multiple fields anyway).
If you’ll forgive just a little reminiscing, I’d like to relate how I came to that conclusion.
At school, at a young age, I was good at all the subjects. What I did differently to a lot of people though, was to perpetuate this multidisciplinary approach right through to the highest levels of study. At 16, when in the UK we sit our first round of ‘big’ national exams, many are already set on the path that will mark them out as ‘artists’ or ‘scientists’. By 18, when we sat our A-Levels, that was certainly the case. I didn’t know anyone that mixed arts and science subjects – in fact, I don’t think the school allowed it. I had to fight to be allowed to mix two foreign languages with economics and computer science. “What the hell are you going to do with that?” the teachers asked me.
At the time, of course, I had no idea. It turned out that Linguistics was the answer. Linguistics, or the science of language (not any particular language), is one of the most cross-disciplinary subjects you can imagine – taking in aspects of sociology, philosophy, logic, biology, psychology, neurology, even mathematics. It’s perfect for a Polymath – and I loved it. I loved it so much that I continued right up to doctoral level. In my last year of university, I started to specialise in phonetics, particularly acoustic phonetics, which is about as close to ‘hard science’ as linguistics gets. When I continued on to a Masters degree, it was in acoustic phonetics in an engineering department – a total step-change from what I was used to. I had to learn maths, which I had given up at the earliest possible opportunity.
Back then, it seemed like an out of character move for me. I had always considered myself more of an artist than a scientist, and certainly never an engineer. But looking back, I can see how it was perfectly in character. I was forced out of my comfort zone, forced to learn another whole set of disciplines and a completely different way of looking at the world (the scientific method). I now know that I wasn’t really studying anything specific – I was indulging my curiosity. I ended up doing a doctorate that covered three entirely separate academic disciplines: engineering, acoustic phonetics and psyschoacoustics. Just as they probably don’t to you, those ‘P’ words meant nothing to me just a few short years earlier. Of course everyone, myself included, thought I was crazy, but I’ve now come to realise that those years, the research and the resulting thesis, are a very accurate reflection of who I am, even if I now have nothing to do with those academic subjects.
To be honest, I’ve struggled for years with the concept of not being dedicated to any one thing. It always seemed to me that everyone else had no trouble defining themselves around a passion – they were either a photographer, a writer, a scientist, a journalist, an artist etc. That was what they had studied, that was their passion, that had always been their passion. It’s just what they did. This feeling was never helped by the constant advice to “find your niche” or “be the go-to person in a particular field”. Being good at everything, but expert in nothing, just didn’t feel like a proper way to be going about life. It felt like a sure-fire path to mediocrity.
Recently though, I came to accept that being a jack-of-all-trades is a perfectly valid, and liberating, self-definition. I don’t have the patience nor persistence to devote the rest of my life to any one particular pursuit – I have a very low boredom threshold. This leads me to jump into a topic, learn as much or as little I need to or want to, and move on. With practice (of which, by now, I’ve had a lot) you can become an exceptionally quick and effective learner. I like to teach myself from books and other resources – I’m not particularly into classes or anything that involves being taught. And what I’ve realised is that not everyone has the capacity for almost endless knowledge acquisition. In fact, a lot of people seem to drop their curiosity and desire for learning as soon as they leave school or university. Curiosity, the desire and the capacity to learn, and a low tolerance to boredom or any other kind of long-term commitment to a particular field, are all hallmarks of my character. Since I accepted that this was ‘me’, I’ve lost the need to define myself within a narrow field or according to a life-long passion. Curiosity and learning themselves are my passions. The subjects in which I immerse myself are merely manifestations of that.
So I’ll never call myself a photographer, or a writer, or a mountain climber. I’ll never be called ‘the football guy’, or the ‘SEO guy’. I just don’t care that much about any one thing.
But as I found out for the first time in 2005, this type of personality is incredibly well suited to launching and running a business. There aren’t a lot of people out there that are able to take care of everything – from the technical implementation of IT systems, to the graphic design elements of branding, to copywriting, to the inter-personnel skills needed for good sales and networking.
If you feel like you’re a multi-disciplinary kind of person, starting a business is a great way of putting your skills to use. If you’re interested in lots of subjects and can’t decide ‘what you want to be when you grow up’, business is a great way to go.
It’s a better reason than just doing it for the money too.