Every time when I hear this topic, an old moment of me, one of my Kusess friend, Mahhe debates about this issue during the 2008 Piala Perdana Menteri English Debate came in a flash. It was the first time Kusess made to the finals against RMC (Maktab Tentera Diraja) and eventual champions on that day too, phenomenal. GO KUSESS, haha.
I'm myself not good at elaborating my points though, unlike my friend Chai Boon here in INTI. LOL
Based on the definition itself shows the jack of all trade is like he owns many skills, but unfortunately a master to none of them. On the other hand, master of one is in command of one skill only. A debate arise from here, which is better? Lets make this a discussion.
Well, to start off, jack of all trade can be take into an example, let say a sportsman, who really knows how to play a lot of games like football, basketball, rugby, and etc. However, he's a master of none of those sports.
I'll say, I too, salute this kind of person, able to know many kinds of sport. Maybe he could be not just a fringe player in those games and get to feature in many kinds of sports and won many certificates and trophies. On the dark side of it, imagine does he will be able to have time for everything?
It is considered to be quite tiresome when you get involved in too much.
Maybe the example given might not be enough, how about this, imagine a worker in the economy is entitled to many tasks. Will he be able to do them all?
Let start small, a sole trader perhaps, entitled to many tasks to ensure his firm to be sound. Will he be able to work it off alone? Of course he need some workers to help him, no human in this world is unable to feel tired.
So now, it goes to the number of workers he employs. Is it enough, to make his life easier? Maybe a small shop is unable to provide a significance.
Lets move to bigger entity, a company have been set up and currently try to employ workers. Not that I know how many sectors in the company itself that needs to be taken care of, but let say there's 4 sectors of administration, sales, creative team, and finance. But, only two workers were employed, thus 2 sectors are to be entitled to one person.
There's always a possibility of them unable to do both tasks at the same time. May result into them feel stressed out too you know.
Therefore, this promotes inefficiency in the economy and the company will be hard to achieve economies of scale, which helps reduce the company's production costs. If every company in the country is doing the same thing, this could slows the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) increase.
Some would say workers with many skills is good to be employed and more preferable thus makes a benefit again to the jack of all trade person. So this may also means that less skilled are to be left aside, making the unemployment rate increase.
To be continued...
3 comments:
A humble opinion from me, owning many skills is certainly bring no harm but specializing in one skill is advantageous too. In the economy perspective, country should focus to produce good with comparative advantage. However, the country should never neglect the importance of diversification of economy. Therefore, I suggest to learn many things so that we can discover in which field we have comparative advantage, the so called 'talent' and 'interest'. Only in that way, we could start specializing.
thanx for mentioning...i will cite it in part two...XD
Interesting topic! Can't resist making comments. Hehe~
I'd say that everything has is pros and cons. Of course owning many skills would be useful but in reality, those masters of one are the ones that people look up to, don't you think so? If you have a master and a jack on your team, people will see the master. The jack, although he may be good at everything else, will remain unknown. Quite sad isn't it~
Being super good at one thing and not good in other things also is not really ideal. Like what Macy had pointed out, diversification is important. No diversity, no self-sufficiency. In the end, you'd end up relying heavily on other people for other matters. On the contrary, the 'jacks' will be able to survive in any situation.
So which one is better? Becoming the jacks or the masters?
I'd say, try your best to be both. :P If you're already good at a particular thing, keep it up and go learn new skills. If you haven't find anything that you're really good at, keep on looking and make use of what you learn along the way. :)
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