Ever heard the saying “jack of all trades, master of none”? It means that if you learn a little bit about many different things, you’ll never become an expert in any one of them. Not only is it hard to find time to put all your knowledge together and create something great with it, trying to do so often results in a subpar product.
You’ll be an amazing animator if you know how to animate well. You’ll be a great artist with strong fundamentals if you have mastered drawing with the proper perspective. Being skilled at many different things takes away from your ability to excel at anything.
By focusing your education on one area, however, you can develop yourself into an authority on the topic. For example, let’s say you’re learning to play the guitar. You start with nothing; you don’t know anything about the instrument on an academic level, so it’s time to learn! If you spend all your time practising chords and strumming, not only will you fail to become an expert at playing the guitar, but you won’t even move past the beginner-intermediate stage.
If you decide to take up music theory instead of just chord progressions and strumming patterns though, then suddenly things get interesting. Chords are just combinations of notes that sound pleasing together (with some properties that help define them further), so learning how this works gives insight into why certain chords progressions work better than others in a song. can lead to writing your own music, if you choose a key and a theme for your song.
Strumming patterns are just playing notes in a rhythm. The difference between an eighth note and a sixteenth note is their duration; an eighth note lasts half as long as a sixteenth note, which itself is half as long as a thirty-second (32nd) note (and so on). You can divide the beat into smaller units like this to play different rhythms that may work better with certain songs. And rhythms are easier to pick up when you understand how notes sound together; this requires musical theory.
The list could go on and on: scales, arpeggios, chords, composition…all these concepts fall under music theory and all of them contribute to your ability to play music. Now imagine applying this idea to another subject! Learning about proper grammar helps you write better stories, and learning how human memory works can help you memorize things more quickly so you can put that time towards something else.
And what about other parts of your life? Maybe math makes doing taxes easier, or science explains why fires burn hotter than candles. There are endless possibilities for acquiring new skills with the right frame of mind! By focusing on one topic, you’ll be able to advance your education further and give yourself a stronger foundation from which all your projects will spring forth.
So don’t say “jack of all trades, master of none.” Be a master of one skill and a jack-of-all-trade in many, if you want to be the best at something!