“No way. Those times are long gone. Nothing was discovered then. Now the best you can do is pick your field and master it.”

The devout specialist is fond of labeling the impetuous learner–Da Vinci and Ben Franklin being just two forgotten examples– “jack of all trades, master of none.” The chorus unites: In the modern world, it is he who specializes who survives and thrives. There is no place for Renaissance men or women. Starry-eyed amateurs.

Is it true? I don’t think so. Here are the top five reasons why being a “jack of all trades,” what I prefer to call a “generalist,” is making a comeback:

5) “Jack of all trades, master of none” is an artificial pairing.

It is entirely possible to be a jack of all trades, master of many. How? Specialists overestimate the time needed to “master” a skill and confuse “master” with “perfect”…

Generalists recognize that the 80/20 principle applies to skills: 20% of a language’s vocabulary will enable you to communicate and understand at least 80%, 20% of a dance like tango (lead and footwork) separates the novice from the pro, 20% of the moves in a sport account for 80% of the scoring, etc. Is this settling for mediocre?

Not at all. Generalists take the condensed study up to, but not beyond, the point of rapidly diminishing returns. There is perhaps a 5% comprehension difference between the focused generalist who studies Japanese systematically for 2 years v/s the specialist who studies Japanese for 10 with the lack of urgency typical of those who claim that something “takes a lifetime to learn.” Hogwash. Based on my experience and research, it is possible to become world-class in almost any skill within one year.

4) In a world of dogmatic specialists, it’s the generalist who ends up running the show.

Is the CEO a better accountant than the CPA? Is Steve Jobs a better programmer than the iTunes VP of Engineering? No, but he has a broad range of skills and sees the unseen interconnectedness. As technology becomes a commodity with the democratization of information, it’s the big-picture generalists who will predict, innovate, and rise to power fastest. There is a reason military “generals” are called such.

3) Boredom is failure.

In a first-world economy where we have the physical necessities covered with even low-class income,  Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs drives us to need more for any measure of comparative “success.” Lack of intellectual stimulation, not superlative material wealth, is what drives us to depression and emotional bankruptcy. Generalizing and experimenting prevents this, while over-specialization guarantees it.

2) Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence instead of fear of the unknown.

It also breeds empathy with the broadest range of human conditions and appreciation of the broadest range of human accomplishments. The alternative is the defensive xenophobia and smugness uniquely common to those whose identities are defined by their job title or single skill, which they pursue out of obligation and not enjoyment.

1) It’s more fun, in the most serious existential sense.

The jack of all trades maximizes his number of peak experiences in life and learns to enjoy the pursuit of excellence unrelated to material gain, all while finding the few things he is truly uniquely suited to dominate.

The specialist who imprisons himself in self-inflicted one-dimensionality — pursuing and impossible perfection — spends decades stagnant or making imperceptible incremental improvements while the curious generalist consistently measures improvement in quantum leaps. It is only the latter who enjoys the process of pursuing excellence.

Don’t put on experiential blinders in the name of specializing. It’s both unnecessary and crippling. Those who label you a “jack of all trades, master of none” are seldom satisfied with themselves.

Why take their advice? Be too complex to categorize.

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People like to call this “thinking outside of the box,” which is the wrong way to look at it. Just like Neo needed to understand that “there is no spoon” in the film The Matrix, you need to realize “there is no box” to step outside of.

You create your own imaginary boxes simply by living life and accepting certain things as “real” when they are just as illusory as the beliefs of a paranoid delusional. The difference is, enough people agree that certain man-made concepts are “real,” so you’re viewed as “normal.” This is good for society overall, but it’s that sort of unquestioning consensus that inhibits your natural creative abilities.

So, rather than looking for ways to inspire creativity, you should just realize the truth. You’re already capable of creative thinking at all times, but you have to strip away the imaginary mental blocks (or boxes) that you’ve picked up along the way to wherever you are today.

I like to keep this list of 10 common ways we suppress our natural creative abilities nearby when I get stuck. It helps me realize that the barriers to a good idea are truly all in my head.

1. Trying to Find the “Right” Answer

One of the worst aspects of formal education is the focus on the correct answer to a particular question or problem. While this approach helps us function in society, it hurts creative thinking because real-life issues are ambiguous. There’s often more than one “correct” answer, and the second one you come up with might be better than the first.

Many of the following mental blocks can be turned around to reveal ways to find more than one answer to any given problem. Try reframing the issue in several different ways in order to prompt different answers, and embrace answering inherently ambiguous questions in several different ways.

2. Logical Thinking

Not only is real life ambiguous, it’s often illogical to the point of madness. While critical thinking skills based on logic are one of our main strengths in evaluating the feasibility of a creative idea, it’s often the enemy of truly innovative thoughts in the first place.

One of the best ways to escape the constraints of your own logical mind is to think metaphorically. One of the reasons why metaphors work so well in communications is that we accept them as true without thinking about it. When you realize that “truth” is often symbolic, you’ll often find that you are actually free to come up with alternatives.

3. Following Rules

One way to view creative thinking is to look at it as a destructive force. You’re tearing away the often arbitrary rules that others have set for you, and asking either “why” or “why not” whenever confronted with the way “everyone” does things.

This is easier said than done, since people will often defend the rules they follow even in the face of evidence that the rule doesn’t work. People love to celebrate rebels like Richard Branson, but few seem brave enough to emulate him. Quit worshipping rule breakers and start breaking some rules.

4. Being Practical

Like logic, practicality is hugely important when it comes to execution, but often stifles innovative ideas before they can properly blossom. Don’t allow the editor into the same room with your inner artist.

Try not to evaluate the actual feasibility of an approach until you’ve allowed it to exist on its own for a bit. Spend time asking “what if” as often as possible, and simply allow your imagination to go where it wants. You might just find yourself discovering a crazy idea that’s so insanely practical that no one’s thought of it before.

5. Play is Not Work

Allowing your mind to be at play is perhaps the most effective way to stimulate creative thinking, and yet many people disassociate play from work. These days, the people who can come up with great ideas and solutions are the most economically rewarded, while worker bees are often employed for the benefit of the creative thinkers.

You’ve heard the expression “work hard and play hard.” All you have to realize is that they’re the same thing to a creative thinker.

6. That’s Not My Job

In an era of hyper-specialization, it’s those who happily explore completely unrelated areas of life and knowledge who best see that everything is related. This goes back to what ad man Carl Ally said about creative persons—they want to be know-it-alls.

Sure, you’ve got to know the specialized stuff in your field, but if you view yourself as an explorer rather than a highly-specialized cog in the machine, you’ll run circles around the technical master in the success department.

7. Being a “Serious” Person

Most of what keeps us civilized boils down to conformity, consistency, shared values, and yes, thinking about things the same way everyone else does. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but if you can mentally accept that it’s actually nothing more than groupthink that helps a society function, you can then give yourself permission to turn everything that’s accepted upside down and shake out the illusions.

Leaders from Egyptian pharaohs to Chinese emperors and European royalty have consulted with fools, or court jesters, when faced with tough problems. The persona of the fool allowed the truth to be told, without the usual ramifications that might come with speaking blasphemy or challenging ingrained social conventions. Give yourself permission to be a fool and see things for what they really are.

8. Avoiding Ambiguity

We rationally realize that most every situation is ambiguous to some degree. And although dividing complex situations into black and white boxes can lead to disaster, we still do it. It’s an innate characteristic of human psychology to desire certainty, but it’s the creative thinker who rejects the false comfort of clarity when it’s not really appropriate.

Ambiguity is your friend if you’re looking to innovate. The fact that most people are uncomfortable exploring uncertainty gives you an advantage, as long as you can embrace ambiguity rather than run from it.

9. Being Wrong is Bad

We hate being wrong, and yet mistakes often teach us the most. Thomas Edison was wrong 1,800 times before getting the light bulb right. Edison’s greatest strength was that he was not afraid to be wrong.

The best thing we do is learn from our mistakes, but we have to free ourselves to make mistakes in the first place. Just try out your ideas and see what happens, take what you learn, and try something else. Ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen if I’m wrong? You’ll often find the benefits of being wrong greatly outweigh the ramifications.

10. I’m Not Creative

Denying your own creativity is like denying you’re human being. We’re all limitlessly creative, but only to the extent that we realize that we create our own limits with the way we think. If you tell yourself you’re not creative, it becomes true. Stop that.

In that sense, awakening your own creativity is similar to the path reported by those who seek spiritual enlightenment. You’re already enlightened, just like you’re already creative, but you have to strip away all of your delusions before you can see it. Acknowledge that you’re inherently creative, and then start tearing down the other barriers you’ve allowed to be created in your mind.

But what does the term “open source” actually mean? Some believe, “It’s free as in freedom, not free as in beer,” while others say, “Sometimes, it’s free as in beer, too!” Others preach, “It’s the open sharing of knowledge,” and some others yell, “Free code!”

With all of this open source talk floating around, it’s easy to get mixed up with what the term really means. Here’s a quick primer to get you started.

The Idea

In order to be a part of the open source crew, there are 10 rules in the Open Source Initiative’s definition that one must follow. But the main pillars behind the idea are these three points: (1) there must be free redistribution (meaning your code can be shared freely), (2) the original source code must be obtainable in a reasonable fashion, and (3) you must allow modifications and derived works.

The Usage

If you’re asking, “So, what’s in it for me?” A lot, actually. Let me break it down into an individual perspective.

Say you’re an employer on Elance with a small brick-and-mortar store that sells hand-crafted jewelry. Business is blossoming and you have your sights set on an global e-Commerce store. However, your budget is limited, you need one-of-a-kind functionality, and you definitely can’t afford to have a site built completely from scratch. Fortunately, you find an expert provider that specializes in open-source e-Commerce solutions. The provider obtains an osCommerce software packages at little or no cost, and with some code-changing trickery, the provider launches your store with all extra features in tact. Your jewelry sells like hotcakes, you become an overnight celebrity, you get your own reality TV show, and you live happily ever after.

The Impact

The benefits of open source are obvious for all parties involved. The provider has access to a wide variety of continuously updated software platforms and solutions that they can personalize to custom specs instead of building an entire platform from the ground up. The provider also has access to a huge, constantly-growing wealth of knowledge through online open-source communities. On the other side, the employer doesn’t have to use (or pay for, in a lot of cases) an entirely proprietary software package, meaning saved money while still being able to fulfill the employer’s very last need.

The previous example is exactly that: one example of many, many possibilities. Need content management? WordPress, MovableType, and Drupal are just a few options. Web server? Apache. Operating system? Linux. Bulletin board software? phpBB. Database? MySQL. Even programming languages have gone open source, with Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby, just to name a few. The list goes on, and on… and on.

The open source world is a deep and complex one. If you’re interested in learning more about open source software or the idea as a whole, check out the Open Source Initiative’s website for more information. The open source page on Wikipedia is also a great place to start. And if you’re interested in using an open source solution for your next project, look no further than our home page – we have countless experts that are fluent in a ton of open source technologies.

It’s great to say you’d like to have bug-free applications, but what happens when the underlying operating system is infested with bad code? Windows XP consists of approximately 40 million lines of code. Try finding the error in that tangle!

To solve this problem, researchers at Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) and Australia’s National Information and Communications Technology Research Centre (NICTA) examined the correctness, reliability and security of the microkernel technology underlying OKL4, OK Labs’ virtualization platform for mobile devices. Erickson (the editorial director of Dr. Dobbs) says their approach was to ‘create a mathematical method for proving the correctness of the underlying source code, using formal logic and programmatic theorem checking. The verification process eliminated a wide range of exploitable errors, such as design flaws and common code-based errors, buffer overflows, null-point dereferences, memory leaks, arithmetic overflows, and exceptions.’”

But is it truly bug-free? Rob McCammon, the VP of product management at Open Kernel Labs, concludes:

“The completion of this research demonstrates that it is possible to create an operating system kernel or hypervisor that is free of a wide range of bugs. The presence of bugs in a system opens the door to attacks on a mobile phone’s privileged mode software. The research shows that a higher level of security and confidence can be provided than was previously thought possible.” (Italics added)

A “wide range of bugs” is NOT “bug-free.” As noted testing blogger Pradeep Soundararajan observes in this post, when asked about bug-free software:

1. “I shall give you the link to download software that remains in a bug-free state in a specific context. Unfortunately, the bugs start showing up if you try downloading the file, opening the file, install the software or start using it. I can guarantee you it’s bug-free if you don’t do anything of that sort with it.”
2. “I think, even, accidentally humans can’t produce bug-free software. The idea of bug-free software itself is the result of imperfect thinking and imperfect understanding of software and bugs. We might end up making better inferences and conjectures about what they are if we are on a continuous learning path.”
   Our thoughts exactly.

The spirit of modern engineering design is integration and simultaneous optimization of all the elements in the multidisciplinary engineering system. And computer software, whether it is for modeling and analysis or for real-time application, is an essential element. It is often the most costly element in terms of complexity and development time and can also be a major source of system failures. So if engineers only just use programs like Excel, MATLAB or LabVIEW and then rely on software specialists to write customized analysis programs or real-time application programs, aren’t they failing in their integration and optimization mission?

At most universities, fresher take an introductory computer programming course usually taught by a non-engineer using a programming language like C or Java to solve non-engineering-type problems. Students do little, if any, computer programming over the next two years, usually as a last resort. When it comes time for the senior-year capstone design experience, all the computer programming gets handed off to the computer geek on the team. Where is the integration? Why should we then expect something different when our graduates become practicing engineers? Engineering Education System is responsible for this situation and immediate changes are needed!

Let’s first differentiate between conventional computer programming and real-time computer programming. Real-time software is at the heart of multidisciplinary engineering systems. It differs from conventional software in that its results must not only be numerically and logically correct, they must also be delivered at the correct time. It must embody the concept of duration, which is not part of conventional software. Real-time software used in most physical system control is also safety-critical. Software malfunction can result in serious injury and/or significant property damage. And asynchronous operations, while uncommon in conventional software, are the heart and soul of real-time software. The hardware interrupt, the capability to stop the current execution of a program and service some device or some sensor outside the program, is the nitty-gritty of real-time software.

Working engineers use computer programs like Excel for data analysis. They are also familiar with CAD software for both mechanical design and electronic circuit analysis. However, they fear traditional code – like C and Assembler – which can perform real-time operations. So while they are comfortable doing computer analysis, they turn computer control over to a software expert. In his view, the problem is also generational. Older engineers often do not trust computer analysis and prefer to design by the “seat of their pants.” Younger engineers seem to trust computers too much and do not think about what the computer results are saying. In general, control is a lost art and with it real-time programming. The situation is the same at the university. When students are asked to design an original system as part of their capstone design experience, they realize they want a real-time microcomputer or computer to control their system and do not know how to implement it.

In the next article, I will offer some solutions to the problem I have described and suggestions for effective computer programming, both for analysis and for real-time applications.

• Automotive and Heavy Engineering
• Civil and Architecture
• Software and Web Development
• Design and Multimedia

We face exigent environment, but while some organizations struggle to endure, others will materialize even stronger. How can you give your business an edge? Making the precise decisions, based on your exclusive strengths. Whether your aspiration is maintaining your market position or improving it, perfect implementation is a must. Having worked from inception with companies worldwide – through up phase and down – we have the experience to help you to come out on top.

Knowledge is the backbone of the art of design and development. That’s where UDS – India’s emerging IT & ITes company – comes in. Extensive use of market information. Service backed by research and in depth knowledge of technology. All this help us provide you ideal solution. So at UDS, you can rely on us. Contact us to see how we can help.

Mahesh Patil – Director UDS