B. U. G. S.

Not Spam

My martial arts instructor once told me to never ask a talented person to show you how to do the thing they’re talented at, because often they don’t know exactly how they manage their feats of genius.

That’s what talent is, a natural propensity or ease in doing something. A classmate of mine who was also a dance major, tried to teach me a few dance steps once. She was talented. So her instruction consisted of telling me: c’mon, it’s easy- just use your body. So I still can’t dance.

I think the trick amounts to finding out the one thing you were born to do. It’s a very hard trick if you’re naturally competent at many things.

And of course our shcools would never teach such heresies as heredity is destiny.

I wish I could say something useful about your podcast Bob, but the site seems to be down.

Maybe you offended somebody.

Comment by Antonio Fini

MY REPLY:

Offended somebody?

Me?

You and Joe make me furious. You both actually TRAINED for fighting. I went into the shooting not only without basic training, but as a presumed expert and leader.

Everything I ever did was not chosen by me and I always was expected to be an expert when I got there.

I wrote about education and was a professor, so I was appointed of Oversight on Education and Labor for House of Representatives. I hadn’t even HEARD of most of the issues I was suddenly an expert on. I was suddenly an international aviation negotiator. I could tell the difference between a DC-3 and 747 and that was about it.

When I was head of a staff on the Ed and Labor Committee, my boss was also ranking Republican on the House Sellect Internal Security Committee — I’m not even sure I got the name right. Since he knew all about my intelligence background, he used me a lot on that.

I tried to explain to him tha my knowledge of intelligence policy was on the level of my expertise that Joe described as “things military,” that is, I could sympathize with the squirrel that I shot the bee-bee right in front of, I had beena lot of places pretending to be a soldier, but he was asking a private about generalship. It scared the hell out of me when he called me about Ed and Labor, but it REALLY scared me when he wanted to discuss security issues.

Seriously, I think he kept calling me in because nobody else really knew much about either subject either, and I was loyal and had common sense.

All my life I have envied people who started in an occupation and STAYED there.

In fact, maybe I fit into the modern world better than most people do. Nowadays almost any field you are in changes so much in a decade you have to keep hopping around and learning the way I did.