Some food for thought… A question came up in conversation the other day that has come up before to which I would like some insight if anyone has any. The question was… “How can you know if you are good at something or above average when there is no scoring system?” When I was 21 years old, I sat in front of the guy that would become my Chief of Police for a job interview and one of the first questions he asked me was… “Are you a good driver?” I answered by telling him I was. Now, I knew that was the correct answer to an interview question for a police officer position but I also whole-heartedly believed that answer to be true. I am apparently no different than most people because study after study shows that when asked; the overwhelming majority of people truly believe they are an above average driver. We know this cannot be true though because if most people were above average, then the average would be higher than it is. However, there definitely are some people that are above average and someone out there is even the BEST driver. But can that person ever know he or she is the best and can we even know if we are truly above or below average? I can pretty confidently say Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, and Wayne Gretzky are above average in there respective sports. The reason for this is there is a scoring system that compares you to your competition and that scoring system is universal. We have no scoring system for driving though. If I were to ask if Jeff Gordon was an above average driver, most people would probably tell me yes, but how do we know? You could say that NASCAR has a scoring system and since he scores high within that scoring system, he must be an above average driver. However, consider this… Jeff Gordon did a commercial for Pepsi MAX about a year ago. You may recall that in the commercial he goes undercover to do a test drive of a new Camero. He pretends to not be comfortable driving a car at first with so much power and then, all of the sudden, takes the car dealer on a ride with some pretty impressive stunt driving. The commercial was pretty convincing. If you are not familiar with it, youtube “Jeff Gordon Pepsi MAX commercial.” Jeff Gordon was interviewed by ESPN (I believe it was ESPN) after the commercial went viral and Jeff admitted he did not even do the driving and the commercial was completely staged. The reason he did not do the driving is that he was not good enough to drive a car like that. Jeff Gordon is very good at driving a perfect purpose-built racecar around a perfectly constructed and purpose-built track. We have no earthly idea if beyond that he is even an average driver in the real world. Also consider Paul Walker’s death. An accomplished racecar driver was driving him. Off the track, that driver, Roger Rodas, killed himself and Paul Walker. I am just using driving as an example that is easy for everyone to relate to but let’s also look at firefighters. Is it possible for a firefighter to know if they are good or even above average at their job? There is no scoring system so how would they or anyone else know if a particular firefighter is good at his or her job or not? Only a very small percentage of firefighters will ever save a life. We know that is largely a matter of circumstance anyways so we cannot use that statistic. There is no way of gauging fires prevented or damage prevented from putting out a fire and individual firefighters work in groups pretty much all the time so how can any individual firefighter know if he or she is even good at their job? I believe they cannot ever know. I also believe the same can be said for every teacher and police officer as well. The only thing I think anyone can know for sure is that a person is below average and that can only be known in extreme cases. An example would be a firefighter with a crippling fear of fire, or a police officer that is afraid of criminals. I believe we can say that those would be cases of people being below average in those professions but I believe that is all we can say. In closing, I have had this conversation with a few people now and no one seems to believe I am correct. This would suggest I have a high probability of being wrong. I would honestly like to be wrong because me being wrong would mean there is a way to know how we all compare to each other. However, no one has ever been able to show me in a way that convinced me. By that I mean no one has been able to show me how to accurately compare two firefighters, teachers, police officers, soldiers, ect. If you read all of this, I am flattered and I appreciate it. :)
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 16:19:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015