Why are we wasting all this natural talent?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he declares that 10,000 hours is the time it takes to perfect your talent. I don’t 100% agree with that because I think we all have something we gravitate towards, we’ve all heard of child prodigies. The one that springs to mind is Ruth Lawrence, who was accepted to Oxford to study maths at 12 years of age. But your experience is more likely to be the star athlete who blew by you at every race or the kids who absorbed languages like a sponge while you were still struggling with your German vocabulary tests.

Another one is much closer to home, my brother. A gifted musician, he won a scholarship to RCM in London. He’s the only one in our family with a degree, a 2.1 but not in music. He went into engineering.

In England the school system isn’t set up to nurture natural talent, you have to choose what you want to study at an age where you shouldn’t be making decisions like that. The saving grace is that if you choose not to pursue higher education, you will still be able to get a job based on experience gained through doing other jobs.

The US is a completely different animal, here the paper is everything, a degree is the goal, saving for a college a family obligation. There are multiple advantages to having an education centric society but here’s the thing.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed two battlefield medics, newly returned from Afghanistan for a school nurse position. The man and woman told how they patched up casualties and got them back on the battlefield, these people saved lives, every damn day. You would think, based on their front line experience that any ER in the country would be honoured to have them. You would be wrong, no BSc, no ER and definitely no school nurse position. They have to retrain for years before they can do a job like that, one they could probably do in their sleep.

A friend’s wife, had her pay cut because she didn’t have the correct qualification, note she’s been doing her job for nearly 10 years, flown lifeflight, taught others, and it’s not like she suddenly got dumber overnight, no paper, less money.

One final example, a friend and colleague who went off to teach for a year, she came back because they told her she’d have to get qualified to take it further, the kids loved her, she was an excellent teacher, but no paper, no inspirational teacher.

I'm sure you can come up with plenty of examples of your own, or come see me in the shop and we'll talk...