There is this notion that one can be a jack of all trades but a master of some. This was to be believed as truth and insurmountable in the world of old, but times change. Now it is false beyond belief. Anyone who thinks of mastery as a singular phenomenon in life has succumbed to a falsehood greater than the need for 40 hour workweeks—a separate discussion.
Before modernity, it took many years or decades to develop a skill and build mastery over/with it. Mastery over any particular craft was due to the needs of the community. Consider a village. A village needs the best person to occupy each role. Most importantly, that person must be the most competent in the skill or craft. You cannot have a faulty cheesemaker or blacksmith. They will produce inedible cheeses or faulty metals, damaging the village. Thus mastery was not a choice: it was a service to the needs of the village.
To add on, mastery of any particular craft was spread out over villages, meaning that each village had one master of each domain, if they were lucky. No one village needed two blacksmiths anymore than they needed two cheesemakers. There existed no “Blacksmith & Cheesemaker” shops like the “Tattoo and Coffee” cafes that exist today. This emphasizes the role of the master even further: they own the domain they reside in to the point where the entire village depends on them for their collective survival.
Mastery of any craft had to be learned and passed down. A soon-to-be blacksmith or cheesemaker had to learn from the greatest and most accessible source around: their parent(s). Mastery ran in the family. Skills passed down through generations helped the village as it progressed through time. To keep the village running as it did before, one must have kept their mastery and continuously improved on it, then teach it to their children who would improve on it further. This was an unbreakable cycle.
As villages grew into kingdoms and travellers were more prominent in the world, the search for masters in different parts of the world began. Even this was treacherous and life-sucking. Seeking a foreign master of a domain (let’s say, writing) forced the seeker to travel many hundreds of miles, dedicate themselves to the master, learn for as long as the master deemed appropriate, and then (after having achieved mastery) go about professing their mastery. There are many other factors to consider, but staying with mastery will allow the point to be made much quicker. Mastery was a life-long journey, and those that achieved mastery could only achieve it once. This is why the saying “jack of all trades, master of none” is still around: people cannot fathom a circumstance where someone is a master at more than one thing.
Mastery of any such thing is more common because of modern innovations to travelling and communication—dubbed the Internet. One need not travel hundreds of miles to learn; they can simply open their laptop. The restriction of even learning from one master has gone as well. Many masters of a domain coexist with each other, able to teach their tips and tricks in the most applicable and accessible manner possible—and the many other students of these masters are also accessible through comments and forums!
The unnecessarily wasted time of travelling and learning through one narrow filter is why mastery of multiple domains is possible. No longer are only parents needed to obtain mastery. No longer are villages dependent on the competence of the master, or even dependent on the master in general. No longer are the days when great distances must be traveled in order to obtain foreign mastery. Time is of the essence, and with saved time, comes greater accessibility to masters, and to mastery.
The greatest age of mastery has begun. The narrow domains which our parents lived in have rotted away, allowing brighter seeds to begin ripening. Masters across many domains will be able to profess their methods, skills, and learning to a much wider and hungrier audience, who is much more capable at grasping—and accepting—these ideas. Now, one can finally be a jack of all trades, and a master of some.