Tell a fish success is measured by climbing a tree, and he will spend his whole life thinking he’s a failure.
What skills, attitudes, personality traits have you seen mismatched to a certain job that later made the individual an awesome worker in another job?
Having a brain is wanted in most professions, however the military would preffer brainless suicidal muscle sacks.
Only for infantry, and only at the lowest levels. They want people to obey, but not be duller than a sack of hammers.
Same with policing. Most police departments (in the US at least) basically don’t want folks above C-student level. There are tests required to be a cop and it’s possible to be rejected for doing too well on them.
brainlesspoor suicidal muscle sacksActually ideally both
“Thinking outside the box” is rewarded in software development but terrifying when applied to assembling an airplane.
Boeing would like to know your location.
Ha! Boeing couldn’t find me when I worked there.
If you become a whistleblower, they’ll find you for sure.
Sadly, the kind of info I have is just embarrassing, not criminal nor safety related.
Thinking outside of the box too much is scary in manufacturing and engineering. Mistakes are expensive to fix.
Also doesn’t work for submarines
Questioning Aurhority.
Probably the most important ability to internalize, yet rarely told by anyone. Turns out most authorities dont like being questioned in terms of legitimacy, yet its important to not blindly follow someone just because of a title. Especially if the title is worthless and does not reflect relevant skills. Everyone can act as CEO, but not everyone can be a medical doctor.
Usually disliked by those who shouldn’t be in a position of authority. Good leaders will be able to really handle and be welcoming of constructive criticism.
I wasn’t outside of getting upset at my mom growing up, and when that would happen, she used to joke “if I was your dad, I’d be a success.”
In all seriousness, one good example I know of is game testers make bad game designers. Back when Nintendo was making Mario Kart 8, they discovered some of the people actually overseeing production actually had bad vertigo (purportedly including Iwata and/or Miyamoto), so they’d invite them in to see the games being tested so they could see if it triggered their vertigo which they would attempt to fix, then repeat cycle. Now had those people with vertigo been making the games, we probably would’ve gotten simple Diddy Kong style race tracks.
Improvisation is a brilliant skill in something where you can just keep going if something goes wrong. Attention to detail is a brilliant skill in something where something going wrong will get someone killed. The example that comes to mind is a stage hand vs a stage hand where pyrotechnics are involved.
That one is thought provoking. The jobs seem so similar at a glance, but they need very different people to do each of the jobs well.
I almost cried with joy when my boss at my new job as a massage therapist thanked me for being so quiet. I was turned down for jobs and nearly fired from one for being “too quiet.”
That sounds amazing!
Saying no in sales is anathema to success. Saying no in HR is everything and the world will burn if you cannot.
stereoblindness is bad when you’re an athlete in a ball game, good when you’re a photographer
This is interesting, how does stereo blindness help with photography?
Stereoblind people already see the world the way a camera does.
I am not sure how non-stereoblind people see in 3D because I’ve been stereoblind my whole life, but I do think it helps me when taking photos.
Stereo vision isn’t very different. Human pupils are only 5-6cm apart, so the effect is only useful for objects less than 20-30 meters away, maybe 50 tops. It only works in the center of our visual field, not in the periphery (that only one eye can see). And then, only on the horizontal, left-right axis. Beyond that, we do depth perception the same way: mostly through experience, parallax, context clues, motion prediction, atmospheric distortion, and the like. It doesn’t change the imagery at all, it’s the same scene if I close one eye. I’m guessing that most people who woke up in a familiar environment (e.g. their bedroom) without stereo vision would take a while to notice.
Soft hands.
Great for massage therapists, surgeons, etc.
Terrible for any physical work such as construction, wood working, etc
Don’t you get rougher hands from those things though? So it would only be disadvantageous for a while, not forever necessarily.
Most neurodivergences
ADHD is hell in a corporate setting but fantastic in a creative profession (I do both)
ASD is great in an office where you can work in an office without distractions and noise, not so great in creative work IMO.
I say that as someone that’s both ASD and ADHD, and have a BFA with a focus on fashion design. I was pretty good at pattern making, but too literal in for design. Currently I do pre-press, and I’m solidly competent.
My untreated ADHD was a huge asset when I worked customer support for an airline. I had tons of customer complements and I was hailed as an example by area management on how to balance corporate costs with getting customers what they want.
I utterly failed managing a team of 15 people doing the exact same job. The multiple competing priorities on any given day often left me in task paralysis.
Now I work in I.T. and my ADHD is an asset again. I complete most days work in 3-5 hours and play video games the rest of the time.
Conversely…there’s a reason why the venn of ASD and IT is almost a single circle
Paranoia (to a healthy degree) is good for information security professionals but drives literally everyone else crazy. I wish people would adopt more of that, though. Maybe we’d see fewer data breaches…
The CEO of my company decided to send a holiday E-Card to everyone right before Christmas. I reported it as a phishing attempt and IT just laughed and said it was fine. Apparently I’m the only one that reported it and just… What? An email from outside our organization that claims to be from the CEO and contains a non-descript link to an unknown website? And I’m the only one that saw red flags from that?!
I’m sorry. I agree with you that your take is valid. I once had to explain to the assistant to the CFO why it was a bad idea to whitelist a gambling website (“they’re doing a fun play for the world Cup that uses points instead of real money’”) for the team handling customer card payments…and even then she still wanted it done until I told her she had to officially sign a release accepting responsibility for negative outcomes.
IT probably just laughed at the absurdity. C suite does whatever it wants and IT just has to deal with the fallout.
In most other jobs you need to have some level of critical thinking and some ethics. The police profession is therefore ruled out.
