Jack of All Trades

I clearly remember reading The Jack of All Trades, New Ideas for American Boys by D. C. Beard. I think it had probably belonged to my father before me; it was well worn and my father was definitely the "Jack of All Trades" type.

I was reminded of this by a recent post and comments at IttyBiz.com. The post was about a survey over at ProBlogger - I had happened to have read that post too, so I was interested in the post and the comments.

Yeah, I know - interrelated posts - that's why we call it the web.

Anyway, the original survey had asked about who designed your website and it turned out that 57% of respondents had designed their own site. Naomi Dunford reacted to that with this:

I hope to God 57% of business owners don't also represent themselves
in court when theyre being sued.

I understand, and agree to some extent, but..

If I were unfortunate enough to be involved in a serious legal issue (lots of money, threat of jail time), I of course would hire a lawyer. But I would also school myself thoroughly in every legal matter relevant to my case. There is no way I am going to trust someone else with something that important. I need to be informed and aware - if the case is lost, it wouldn't mean a great deal to my lawyer, but it would be very important to me.

It's the same with medical issues. I'll let my doctor deal with a physical exam, but if anything serious ever came up, I'm not going to trust him. If he's careless or ignorant, he loses a patient he barely knows, but I could lose much more. My health is too important to leave to a doctor.

I used to have accountants do my taxes. Good accountants, expensive accountants. People with lots of degrees and big name clients.. and they didn't do a good job with my taxes. I don't mean that they did a bad job, no, not at all. But they simply did NOT take the care and time that I take doing my own taxes. Again, I'm just a client to them.. I want my taxes accurate, legal, and IRS audit proof: that's why I do my own.

And this is why I do my own site design, coding.. this site is very important to me and is responsible for a lot of my income. I simply cannot trust someone else to do it. I can listen to advice, I can even pay for advice, but at the end of the day, I need to be responsible for it. Maybe that "Jack of All Trades" book and my Dad's self reliant attitude molded me this way, or maybe this is how I would have been anyway..

By the way, IttyBiz.com has some really good small business Marketing articles. That's an area that I do not know much about, and I like that IttyBiz is aimed at business with five or less employees.. most other sites seem to be speaking to much larger businesses.

Comments /foo-self-employed/jack_of_all_trades.html


Add your comments

Why no "Digg this!" etc.?

Unix and Linux Support

Enter your email address for automatic notification of new posts here
(be sure to whitelist 'feedburner.com' if you use spam filtering)

21474-080107-131874-92

Have you tried Searching this site?

Unix/Linux/Mac OS X support by phone, email or on-site: Support Rates

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more. We appreciate comments and article submissions.

Publishing your articles here