David Hughes

Last February, I stumbled across a short news story that — at first glance — seemed only mildly entertaining and mostly innocuous. It was only interesting because it was weird. But I can't stop thinking about this particular article. These are the opening paragraphs, as they appeared online:

London (AP) — Answering a nationwide appeal for tall people with athletic potential, more than 50 prospective Olympic athletes have been placed in British training programs for the 2012 London Games.

More than 3,800 people applied to be part of the "Sporting Giants" project. They were tested for their skills in four Olympic sports — rowing, handball, beach volleyball and indoor volleyball.

Making the cut were 34 rowers, 11 handball players and seven volleyball players. They have been integrated into various British Olympic training squads.

"There are so many people out there who don't know how good they could be at sports they've probably not even thought about," UK Sport talent identification manager Chelsea Warr said Thursday. "This was a mild shake of the tree. We looked under a few rocks and look what we found."

I find this information fascinating, and not just because I'm the coauthor of an upcoming 677-page book tentatively titled Future Legends of British Handball. What intrigues me is the brilliantly simplistic premise of the British experiment — it eradicated the role of self-selection from the process of achievement. Now, I realize that sentiment sounds borderline draconian. But the technique might be rewarding in a lot of contexts that have nothing to do with skeletal frames or volleyball. The Sporting Giants project operated on the belief that the average tall person in London might not realize he was perfectly designed to excel at an activity he'd never even considered. It seems possible that this same logic could apply to most human endeavors. Because most people don't know what they're good at.

Imagine you are Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves.

Imagine that your fictional high school experience is almost over. You have just been thrown off the football team for criticizing Craig T. Nelson's skepticism of Scientology, and your life will now take one of two paths: Either you will a) take a job at the local steel mill and remain trapped in your depressing Pennsylvania town, or b) earn a scholarship and pursue your adolescent love of mechanical engineering. In the first case, you have no agency over the decision that will define your existence. In the second situation, you get to pick how you will try to make a living — even though you really have no idea how good an engineer you will be or how much you will enjoy the actual work. In the former scenario, your life follows the path of least resistance; in the latter scenario, you'll invest years of energy and thought toward a vocation you wanted at the age of seventeen but might despise when you're thirty-seven. Either way, you'll inadvertently ignore all the other careers that might suit your skill set far better (Navy pilot, Nascar driver, annoying Kokomo bartender, bisexual vampire, etc.).

Look at it like this: There are many traits necessary for someone to be a physician, and understanding medicine is chief among them. But being a good doctor requires countless other things that are difficult to imagine or test for — the way a person interacts with unusually nervous patients, the capacity to diagnose unconventional problems, ethical boundaries, etc. These details are essential but only tangible in practice. As a result, medical schools are forced to choose candidates based on academic achievement (school grades and MCAT scores) and how effectively an applicant expresses the desire to be a doctor. But what if the applicants don't understand their own desires? What if the understanding of medicine is only marginally related to the application of medicine? We rely on future doctors to select themselves; we assume the kind of person who would be good at medicine will naturally gravitate toward that craft, and that the type of twenty-one-year-old who's sharp enough to get into (and complete) medical school will be able to adopt all the other skills needed for the job. This is how most life paths are patterned, medical and otherwise: We assume people (somehow) understand who they are and what they can do. This is most readily apparent with high-profile public occupations — NBA general managers, FEMA administrators, the U.S. Presidency, and virtually anyone who works in human resources. It seems like there must be a better way.

I am not suggesting that anyone should be forced to accept a life just because they're theoretically built for it, nor am I discounting the role that aspiration plays in someone's success. But I do wonder if our reliance on self-selection drastically limits the parameters of human potential (and human happiness). It has been my experience that people are not good at understanding themselves; they tend to over- or underestimate their intelligence, they consistently behave in ways that contradict their espoused wishes, and when asked directly, they conflate their defining personality traits with how those traits are perceived by others (optimistic vs. pessimistic; extroverted vs. introverted, etc.). This is no one's fault or failing; it's simply impossible to be objective or insightful about the person you have always been. And since this is the case, it shouldn't be surprising that a) so many people are unhappy with what they have chosen to do for a living, and b) so many people aren't particularly good at the functions they've devoted their lives to. Moreover, those two issues are almost certainly interrelated. Try to think of the ten happiest people you know. How many of those ten are good at what they do for a living? People select careers that seem interesting or lucrative, but they only enjoy jobs for which they have an aptitude. If there were a way to fit people into jobs they're naturally, unconsciously good at — as opposed to jobs they think they'd want to have — everyone might be better off.

So how could this be done? How does one place people in lives they've never even considered? The British Sporting Giants model might not be far off. It was so rudimentary that it almost seems absurd: They just examined a few sports and concluded that the single unifying element that most often led to success was physical frame. Rowing is a sport that requires myriad skills, and it's a sport that short people can sometimes succeed at, but on average, it is a huge advantage to have long arms. It's purely mathematical. And this is something most people don't consider. Most long-armed people do not sit around thinking, You know, I bet I could totally row the shit out of a narrow watercraft. No non-rower ever thinks like this. But place that long-armed man in a boat and he realizes what he was made to do. So, what if we changed the way we hired people? What if instead of having people attempt to select and pursue careers, employers advertised for blind characteristics? What if they analyzed the nature of specialized jobs, figured out which qualities were most central to success, and then recruited people who possessed those specific abilities (regardless of who they were, what they'd done before, or what they thought they were supposed to do for a living)?

Now, I realize they would sometimes be wrong. In fact, they might be wrong most of the time.

But would they be any less right than you?

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