Know Your Limitations: Find The Right Job.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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:

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Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

16 thoughts on “Know Your Limitations: Find The Right Job.”

    1. Baltimore P.D. Hmm Note the critical “and” (No healing power for you, today!)

      Cops are sworn to uphold the Constitution and abide by the rules and regulations of their agency

      Including the one that requires turning a blind eye to rape, murder, and repeatedly bashing gay Vietnamese reporters in the face. As long as the victim is an agency-approved target or the perp is an agency-protected one.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu_LCNLillU

      Being good at being a cop… How do you make that work anymore outside of small towns like mine?

    2. Well, I will admit Dirty Harry isn’t a how-to movie. And he’d be really funny as a traffic cop. “Want to speed? We’ll take my ticket, punk.”

  1. After trying several things which did not work at all, I found I could sit at the wheel of an 18 wheeler for 12 hours a day. Not much of a life. It paid the bills. No one would pay me to be funny, as with:
    My wife refuses to wear anything with a fashion designer’s name. She is on a higher plain.

    John, there are actually people who would pay you for your model building skills. I saw an ad for a dental clinic for a person to make dentures. One of the related skills mentioned was model building with special attention to detail and precise fit

  2. I’ll normally take on most anything, after seeing the numbnuts that I normally hire to do things. I reason that if it’s going to be screwed up, it may as well be me to do it. Although as I get older, I do less and less of this.

    The part about the motor cracked me up. One of the proudest moments of my life was having my son work with me replacing a fence. At one point, I was holding the planks for him to nail. He looked up at me and said “We’d get done a lot faster if you did something else right now.” – So I did, I moved on to replacing the roof of our shed, with a smile on my face. Dude was maybe 11 at the time.

    1. That’s a great story – yeah, I’m always proud when my boys take something from me and gently tell me to sit down with a nice coffee since they can do it better.

  3. I saw the not-fitting-through-the-door point paying off about a paragraph into the tale.
    Long hours of watching professional movie propmakers make things too big to fit in and out even stage elephant doors pay off like that for learning valuable lessons from other people’s mistakes.

    FWIW, your mission in life before you grow up* is to figure out three things:

    1) What you can do.
    2) What you like to do.
    3) What you can make a living doing.

    Where all three of those points intersect, you have your calling.†

    Try sticking with anything that meets less than all three, no matter how high you peg any other needle(s), and you will be miserable every minute of your working existence.
    And you’ll deserve it.

    *Growing up is not a given age.
    You may determine your calling early on.
    But to not determine it, or uncaringly settle for never finding it, is to not grow up.
    Definitionally.

    † You may have more than one calling, even simultaneously.
    Perhaps dozens.
    You can even change yours, even at will.
    But no one has lass than one, unless they are a zero.
    And I’ve never met a high school guidance counselor ever, anywhere, who grasped any of this.
    Ignore them studiously. If >99% of them weren’t idiots, they wouldn’t be high school guidance counselors.
    Definitionally.

      1. Know all the questions but not the answers
        Look for the different instead of the same
        Never walk where there’s room for running
        And don’t do anything that can’t be a game.

        Rules for getting maturity without Grown-up-itude.

        But you may reach a point where resisting the urge to climb that tree is in your best interests.

    1. Modify #2 to What you don’t mind doing, Mr. Aesop and you’re on. Liking it (your passion) is the road to your calling. That’s swell. But just NOT disliking it, is the road to your opportunity. And that works out fine for most folks.

      Shoot just nailing #3 can give you enough wiggle room to get #1 cranked up, which can get you leverage to my number 2 (or yours, if you’re lucky or rich). Most of my family started working in janitorial services.

      Because despite what the Muh Feelz weenies like to claim, your attitude is the one thing you really can control.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVEuPmVAb8o

      So yeah. Now that I think about it, if you’re right. You do get to choose your own misery.

    2. Well said. As I get older, I find my intersection moves a bit. Perhaps my custom PEZ decorating business will take off one day . . .

  4. Age, and wisdom, both determined my limitations have not only increased, they were at a level beyond what I thought they were before. Some might call my former assumptions as foolish. I’d rather call it ” youthful exuberance”.

    1. Yes – it’s amazing the amount of trouble that youthful exuberance and Coors Light can got me into . . . .

  5. One of the unexpected benefits of a health crisis was finding out that not being able to sit in an office 9-10 hours a day and checking my email on vacation in return for a regular check and benefits meant that I found out there is a whole world of employment out there that isn’t “traditional”. You find what you can do and what you enjoy and if you are decent at it, people will pay you. I would love to do something handy like machinist or welding but I am awful at that sort of stuff but doing what I do now? I am very good at it and people compensate me quite nicely for it. The traditional job structure is fine for a lot of people but it creates handcuffs that keep you from considering other options.

    1. Sounds like a very happy accident! I’ve known a couple of people who have found the same thing. Always love to learn how people got to the next step . . . .

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