Jack of all trades master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.

The Hedgehog and the Fox is arguably Isaiah Berlin’s most famous book, a short book of just 80 pages although in the most recent updated edition it extends to 122 pages with a forward by Michael Ignatieff and a lengthly Appendix. The book’s title is based on a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The quote may may simply mean the hedgehog has the one trick needed to thwart the crafty fox. However, Berlin uses the quote to divide thinkers into two groups: hedgehogs whose world is explained by a single guiding idea (faith, belief, dogma) and foxes whose world is diverse, maybe even chaotic, filled with a variety of experiences that cannot be synthesized. He goes on to argue that Leo Tolstoy is by nature a fox who yearned to be a hedgehog while Dostoevsky “is nothing if not a hedgehog.” Vladimir Nabokov writes that “Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose authors” in his Lectures On Russian Literature. About Dostoevsky Nabokov says he “is not a great writer but a rather mediocre one–with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.”

For those who worry from time to time if their life is on the right track, there has been a lengthly discussion possibly since the time of Archilochus about whether one should be a specialist (hedgehog) or a generalist (fox). A few years back Malcolm Gladwell introduced the “10,000 hour rule” in his book Outliers: The Story Of Success. He argued the old maxim practice makes perfect. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Pre-Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro the 10,000 steps a day rule was considered essential for weight loss. Today you can lose weight by just popping a pill. Likewise Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule has lost a bit of shine after a book by David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World, made a compelling argument for playing the field as we used to call it back in my day although we applied it to choosing a mate rather than a career.

I’m happy to see generalists making a comeback since I’m a bit of a generalist myself. I gave up a promising career in economics to become a restauranteur then sold my restaurant to start a financial planning business from which I eventually retired to become a blogger and author. It’s good to know these weren’t fatal career moves since I can’t have a do-over. I’ve always known instinctively that I’m fated to be a generalist. That’s why I was impressed by Robert Hagstrom’s book, Investing: The Last Liberal Art, which argues that the knowledge conveyed in a liberal arts curriculum begets wide understanding that improves investment skills. It works for me. In economics I learned to preface my statements with the “other things equal” admonition. Interesting conclusions can result but the unfortunate fact is that other things are never equal.

What does it mean to be a fox who yearns to be a hedgehog? Since I can’t ask Tolstoy I read Isaiah Berlin, Nabokov, Gladwell, Hagstrom and Epstein together with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

A fox knows “the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatred, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is.” This is what makes Tolstoy such a great prose writer. You get a believable picture of life as it really is. However, Tolstoy “longed for a universal explanatory principle,” that one big thing the hedgehog has. Tolstoy “believed that only by patient empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are inspired vehicles of the divine affairs.”

As one reviewer of Isaiah Berlin put it “there are two different ways of approaching or knowing reality–put quite simplistically, the way of the far-ranging generalist and the way of the concentrated specialist.” Both are useful for society and both can be dangerous if they overstep. A generalist must beware the Dunning-Kruger effect, that is having just enough knowledge to be dangerous or thinking he knows more than he does. On the other hand the specialist must beware of big ideas, especially when trying to apply them to society as a whole. Big thinkers, big doers, the so-called titans of history can lead us to perdition as well as to salvation. Unfortunately we can never know if we get the big picture right. As Berlin puts it: “Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their country and community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless.” (And, I would say, the most dangerous.)

Another way to put this is: “if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos–a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.”

Okay, this is already too long. I apologize. It’s a somewhat different riff on a past blog For Love Of Math: Platonist, Positivist, Philanderist. Fox or Hedgehog, both have their benefits and dangers. As Kumar Abhishek says in an article in Forbes: “Be a jack-of-all-trades and master of some.” So, which is the best path the generalist or the specialist? Neither or both. What really matters in life IMHO is people: partners, parents, friends, teachers and how we treat each other. Be the best fox or the best hedgehog you can be. Know yourself as Socrates wisely said. And listen to the music.