Jack of all trades, Master of none.

Like every other kid, my very first hero was my father. My father, R. K. Gupta was one tough

man who came from a small city in Uttar Pradesh, India to Mumbai, the silver city of India, at a

tender age of 16. He never completed his schooling due to the poor condition of his family which

required him to go to Mumbai and work at such a tender age so that he could support them by

sending them what little money he could earn. Because of his lack of schooling, he wasn’t an

educated individual and therefore had to resort to any kind of job which was mainly unskilled

labour such as cleaning, chaffering etc. But being an uneducated teenager didn’t prevent him

from dreaming big. He would make sure he was learning all the time, picking up new skills,

learning and growing. Through his hard work and perseverance, he was able to rise through

levels and eventually establish his firm.

During one of my childhood days, I got the privilege to visit my father’s company. I got to meet

a couple of his employees, witness the fundamental advancement of the firm and the gears that

made the clockwork, but I finally ended up sitting in my father’s office for the rest of the day.

Sitting in his chair I could feel what a boss felt, the power and authority one had over his fellow

employees. I wished that I could be the same one day, a self-made man who built his company

from scratch. Basking in my fantasies, I didn’t notice my father enter his office until he closed

the door. He was in a rush and I quickly vacated his seat as he picked up his phone and made a

call to who I believe was a client of his.

He started talking with the person at the end of the phone in a local language called Marathi

which I was faintly familiar with, just enough to recognise it. Throughout the conversation, I

could deduce that my father wasn’t comfortable with communicating in this local dialect because

of all his pauses and continuous repetitions but went on to communicate with his average

proficiency in this local language which was foreign to him.

After this conversation of his, he went on to make a few other calls to other individuals and

started talking with them in other local languages that even I was not aware of but these

conversations were very still similar, it was evident that he wasn’t fluent or comfortable in any of

the languages that he was communicating in but he would still push forward through the setbacks

and continued to keep up with the conversation. After a good 20 minutes on the dialect

rollercoaster, my father finally came to a halt with all these calls and put the phone down and

took a long-needed break.

Impressed with my father’s average proficiency in multiple languages given his below-average

years of schooling, I asked him how he managed to gain such a talent. His reply astounded me.

He told me that not everything could be learnt in a school, sometimes experience from real life

can teach you lessons that no teacher can ever teach you. He learnt every single language

through rigorous practice and regular conversations with fluent locals. It was a very long process

with many instances of humility and embarrassment but he believed that the fruit that this

process bore was fulfilling for him. Even though he didn’t have mastery over any language, he

had the experience of almost every one of them (he was the living embodiment of the concept of

quantity over quality).

Although I was amazed by his perseverance, my young self just couldn’t agree with his

reasoning of learning multiple languages. I asked him, “What is the use of learning all these local

languages? Why don’t you just improve yourself in one language which should be Hindi, our

national language, and spare yourself the trouble? Why be a jack of all trades and a master of

none?” Being a master of our national language would make my dad a scholar in that area. He

could flaunt himself to his peers as an educated man who knows how to communicate like one

(all the upper-class Indians would either converse in English or high-level Hindi).

His reply stunned me. “I didn’t learn all these languages to converse with my clients or my

workers, I learnt these languages so that I can connect to them. I don’t want to understand what

they are saying, I want to understand what they are trying to express. What kind of a boss would

I be if I wasn’t able to connect with my employees? If I wasn’t able to understand their concerns,

queries or simple questions which they weren’t able to explain in our national language but were

easily able to present in their mother tongue? What kind of a businessman would I be if I wasn’t

able to communicate with my clients with ease? If I wasn’t able to make them feel comfortable

conversing with me? How am I supposed to win I client over if I can’t assure him that I am one

of his own?”

He told me to remember one thing and it is that “A jack of all trades and a master of none can

sometimes be better than a master of one.” This statement hit me hard and made me contemplate

the wrong notion that being bilingual is a burden because of all the hassle that one faces when

learning a new language. Learning new languages brings in new perspectives and eliminates
tunnel vision. You start connecting to different cultures, opening yourself to change and a new

angle of thinking that helps in problem-solving which I am sure one would benefit from in the

short-term as well as long-term.