Know Your Limitations: Find The Right Job.

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Magnum Force

I assure you, playing Risk® with Clint Eastwood is difficult.  He brings real artillery.

Ma Wilder was into pot.

Pots, really, ones made out of clay.  Which led to the next step:  Ma Wilder wanted a pottery wheel.  Why?  She was making pots, and the closest public pottery wheel was 45 miles away.  Heck, Ma Wilder and some bored doctor’s wife were probably the only people who had a pottery wheel in the whole county.

Being that Pa and Ma Wilder had enough money to pay for Wilder Redoubt, feed me, and to pay for the pottery wheel, Pa bought a pottery wheel for Ma.  Since this was before Amazon® Prime™, Ma Wilder ordered it out of some magazine, probably Bored Doctor’s Wife’s Hobbies Quarterly, and a group of burly UPS® drivers drove an hour out of their way to deliver the wheel.

What arrived wasn’t a fully assembled pottery wheel – it was the parts.  This particular contraption was heavy – it had a large concrete wheel several feet in diameter, and about four inches thick.  The idea behind a pottery wheel is that you get the whole contraption spinning, and the inertia of the heavy wheel would keep it going while you turned a $3.00 piece of clay into a lopsided $1.50 pot that only a kindergartner’s mother could love.

It was Ma Wilder’s goal that they name a radioactive turtle after her in 300 years.

Pa Wilder spread the pottery wheel parts out on the shag carpeting in my bedroom.  My bedroom had a door to the greenhouse where Ma Wilder wanted to set up her pottery studio, so it was nearly a logical place to put the pottery wheel together.  Pa Wilder had many things that put him in a good mood – but assembling pottery wheels was not one of them, and I could tell that this particular Saturday morning he was not amused.  Grumpy, I believe is the term, but grumpy doesn’t convey the sense of hate that I felt emanating from him onto the parts arrayed on the floor like the internal organs of a Muppet® after an autopsy.

This particular Muppet® kermitted suicide.

I sat quietly watching, as it was my bedroom, after all.  I think I was in fourth or fifth grade.  Even then, I liked to build models – model planes, model spaceships, model tanks, model ships, and model cars.  I loved the feel of the parts fitting together, the minor polishing and trimming to make them fit perfectly, and look perfectly.  Modelling to me was intuitive, as was assembling most mechanical things.  It also was a great protector of my virginity.

While Pa Wilder made many wonderful things in his woodshop, they were things he designed, things that he built in his mind before he ever let his saw cut into the wood.  I still have a bookcase he built when he was in high school – a beautifully crafted piece of furniture that was assembled without a single nail.  But when it came to building things that other people had designed, especially mechanical things?

Yikes.

So, as I sat and silently watched him cuss the pottery wheel together – mostly various forms of “damn thing” and, certainly no f-bombs – I tried to psychically will him to put the right Tab A into the correct Slot B.   Eventually he did.  The pottery wheel was built well – all the pieces were well manufactured, and fit perfectly when they were assembled correctly.

I was pleased to find a picture of the exact same model.  Not included:  Pa Wilder.

Pa Wilder, at times, looked like he was attempting to build a trap for some sort large aquatic animal, say, a beaver.  It was difficult watching him put uprights in upside down.  He stared at the end caps that covered the tubing like a Neolithic caveman attempting to understand quantum mechanics written in a language entirely derived from rap lyrics, yo.  But, he finally got most of the parts together.

Then it came to the final step – assembling the motor.  This particular pottery wheel had an attachment, a motor that you could install so you could skip kicking the concrete disk and use electricity to power up the wheel to optimum clay-wasting speed.  Pa was attempting to install it.  I watched him, frustrated, try to put it in exactly backwards.  I finally burst.

“NO!  It doesn’t go that way.  You have to turn it.”

He looked down at the instructions, grimaced, and looked back at me.  He held out the motor assembly.

I took it.  I fitted it to the upright.  “It fits this way – you have to adjust it so when you push your foot on to this pedal,” I pointed, “That it pushes this switch down.  That turns on the motor.”

This is the pottery wheel equivalent of vaping.

He pulled out the wrench and tightened down the bolts holding it in place.  He smiled.  Rather than being mad at his odd son, he was pleased.  And as he looked on the completed pottery wheel, he was happy.

For about a minute.

“Dad,” I pointed at the door to Ma’s new pottery shed, “I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to fit through the door.”  To his credit, he still didn’t drop the f-bomb.

It went together more quickly the second time.

Different people have different aptitudes.  And while Pa Wilder was wonderful at many things, like running a business and not killing his son for waiting to tell him about door widths, there were things he wasn’t good at.  He wasn’t mechanically minded at all, and seemed to have a “deer avoidance radar” during hunting season.

That pottery wheel frustrated Pa Wilder to no end.

There was a time when I thought I could do anything.  I felt, flush with the hubris of youth, that I was invincible, bullet-proof, and a dozen feet tall, and that was before I discovered tequila.  But after a while, I realized that there were jobs that, while I might be able to do them intellectually, I would never be able to do them for a living.  Well, I might be able to do them, if they took all of the sharp things out of the room, and maybe covered all that tough drywall with padding so I didn’t hurt my head when I slammed it into it.

Accountants have a heck of a time getting to sleep – if they’re counting sheep and miss just one . . . .

Let me give you one example:  accounting.  I would suck at that.  I saw an accountant chase $1.37 for a day.  Why?  Because the books had to balance.  It didn’t matter that the $1.37 was out of about $700,000.  Nope.  Still had to find it.  So, accountant is out.   I could name a dozen more jobs I would hate doing.  But for me, knowing what I’m unsuited to do is victory enough, especially since I can do other things, like polish Johnny Depp’s philtrum and uvula after he’s had a hard night with the “ladies”.  I don’t spend time trying to fix my accounting weakness, rather, I spend time trying to learn and get better at things I’m good at, which people might also pay for.

A large part of avoiding frustration in life is understanding what you are good at.  More importantly, understanding what you are good at that will make money for you.  As good as I might be at making models (and I’m not anymore, but 14 year-old me was), there’s certainly no demand for people who make models.  Unless they’re Cindy Crawford’s parents.

Cindy spent an hour staring at an orange juice can – it said “concentrate.”

Yes, you have to be who you are.  Doing things that are fundamentally unsuited to you, your skills, and your personality will kill you.  And, no, getting up at 6:30AM or even 5:30AM every day is not fundamentally unsuited to you.  And no, working hard and sweating is not a skill you don’t have – we all have that skill.  Your personality?  Yeah, it can include giving everything you have each day.

None of this is an excuse for anyone to not meet their obligations or wait in Mom’s basement until they get the invitation to interview as CEO of a video game company.  In fact it’s the opposite.  Most people would suck as the CEO of a video game company, and very, very few would be any good at it.

Speaking of being not good at something . . .  .

After Ma Wilder got her pottery studio going, she decided to do the natural, maternal thing.  No, not drink wine until 11PM while listening to Tom Jones®.  She decided to show me how to use her pottery wheel.  My attempt at making a pot was similar to Pa Wilder’s attempt to put the pottery wheel together – except Ma looked dimly upon me cussing.

After my one, very sad and utterly talentless pot, Ma Wilder relented and let me go trout not-catching.  It would be called trout fishing if I ever caught one, but it was a great way to spend the day down by the river.  Fish?  Never caught one there.  But there were lots and lots of rocks.

At least I can skip a stone.  Does that pay very well?

 

For Fran: