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TFL 039 150 150 Ben Coker

One Trick Pony

or Jack of All Trades?

I recently had a hernia repair. It was apparently quite complex, the surgeon described it as a ‘triple hernia’ but I didn’t really want to know the details, just sit quietly and recover.

The consultant surgeon is reputed to be one of the top two or three hernia specialists in the country. He only does hernia operations. Not because he can’t do anything else, it’s a matter of choice, what he wants to focus on as a very experienced consultant surgeon with a long and distinguished career from his original graduation as a junior doctor.
But now, he only does one thing and does it really well.

My Dad was similar in a way. His career was in Public Health, now part of the all-encompassing ‘Health & Safety’ sector. It started when he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps before the war inspecting hygiene at army camps across the UK. He ended his career as Principal Lecturer in Public Health at a London College. But his topic, his speciality, was meat inspection. He had thousands of photographs of how to recognise infected or poor quality meat and whether it was fit for human consumption. As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Health he was the ‘meat’ guy.

Both my Dad and my surgeon approached the end of their careers as ‘One Trick Ponies’. Absolute specialists in their chosen field.

People often dismiss ‘one trick ponies’ in the belief they can only do one thing and are no use for anything else. This is based on the idea it’s the only thing they’ve ever done but this is where they go wrong in their assumptions.

You or I don’t start as one trick ponies – we end up there, we choose what we like to do best out of all the things we’ve done and focus on it, backed up by a wealth of experience in and around the topic we’ve chosen.

At the other end of the scale, we find an equally maligned character – the ‘Jack of all Trades’, someone with a large portfolio of skills performing many roles quite efficiently and effectively.

The trouble is ‘common knowledge’ proscribes these people as ‘Masters of Nothing’ which although open to misinterpretation is hardly ever true. You and I can be ‘masters’ of many things.

don’t know much about the history of my surgeon, but he must have engaged with many medical disciplines to get his current expert status. I do know though many of the things my Dad did starting as a corporal inspecting latrines, through to being a ‘Sanitary’ and then ‘Public Health’ Inspector with various local councils, before moving into education.

His career as a ‘Jack of all Trades’ in public health involved everything from dealing with rodents, overseeing abattoirs and checking out the ‘new’ phenomenon of Chinese and Indian restaurants prior to allowing them to trade.

There were a lot of appearances in Court as an Expert Witness’ on health and hygiene but eventually, like my surgeon, he turned into a ‘One Trick Pony’ in his specialist area.

The thing is, you or I cannot realise (turn into reality) our ‘niche’ until we’ve been through the ‘jack of all trades’ apprenticeship. It’s how things work – there is no short cut. So don’t be pressured into defining your ‘niche’ at the start. To become, as Peter Thomson puts it “a category of one” you and I have to ‘serve our time’.

If you’d like to discuss this please do book a call with me free of charge

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