# What makes someone good at your profession? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 10, 2010, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705 "2010-12-10T21:34:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/21 "2010-12-12T14:08:28Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Cpincidentally, we just went through an exercise at work involving identifying core skills needs to do a given job. My job got these ones: > > - Excellent verbal communication skills > - Deftness, flexibility, and skill in dealing with different types of people > - Ability to work without any direct supervision > - General understanding of the operational systems of businesses > - Specific understanding of standards > - Clear and unambiguous understanding and commitment to ethics (really, it’s specifically important to my job) > - Strong written communication skills I’m having trouble imagining any job involving working with or for other people for which these _wouldn’t_ be core skills. Not that it’s a bad list, mind, just that it’s so generic as to be much like a newspaper horoscope. ---
**Author:** ![Acid\_Lamp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Acid\_Lamp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acid_Lamp)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/22 "2010-12-12T15:41:41Z")
I have a part time job at a garden center where I help people design their landscapes. The biggest thing to being successful is twofold. First you must have the ability to persuade the client to share their preferred aesthetics with you in a manner that is comprehensible. This is harder than it sounds. Most people are very, very vague about what they like. “Something with color” or " I like leafy shrubs." Accompanied by some odd hand gestures is the norm. Having a wide range of design terms available to you, and being able to communicate them to a total novice is pretty critical. Secondly, you need to have a very broad understanding of lots of different types of plant and hardscape materials. You don’t need to be an expert in any one area, but you need to understand the basic horticultural principles of all the major plant genus’ common in your area. It helps immensely if you are familiar with the more exotic materials that will grow in your zone as well. It gives you _options_ to present to a client, and THAT is what makes the sale every time. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/23 "2010-12-12T16:18:35Z")
In-house sales (manufacturing): You must be able to listen, to chat with a wide variety of people, to make them feel comfortable with your product and with you, to give them a sense that what you don’t know you will find out, that you are never bored or impatient with them, that you welcome the ten millionth fiddly question, that the product will do what you say it will do (which sometimes means you say, “Wow, I’m not so sure our product is going to do what you want”), and generally the sense that they are not going to be forgotten or overlooked. When that person hangs up the phone, I want them to be glad they called me and I want them to understand what is going to happen next. ---
**Author:** ![Antigen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/848f3c/32.png) [@Antigen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antigen)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/24 "2010-12-12T16:54:26Z")
I’m a medical laboratory technologist. The most important aspect to being good at this profession is to **give a damn**. Honestly. To realize that each and every one of the tests you’re running, all troubleshooting and maintenance you’re doing, is affecting a patient’s care. If you never forget that, you will always do your best to put out good work and accurate results. Other very important things: **Knowing what you don’t know. And knowing where to find it**. You can’t know everything. That’s why we have such detailed procedure manuals. And one of the most dangerous things you can do is just guess when you’re pretty sure you remember how to do something. Use the wrong diluent, or don’t let something incubate long enough, and you can get completely wrong results. Look it up, look it up, look it up, unless you’re _sure_. This relates to the first principle of giving a damn. If this was your mother’s test, would you wing it? **Detecting when results don’t make sense**. You need to investigate things that fall way outside of normal. Have a specimen with an insanely high glucose level, and everything else seems too low? Maybe it was drawn beside an IV where a patient was getting glucose, and it’s been diluted with the glucose solution - don’t just hit enter and report the result, it may not be legit! Call. Investigate. Get a better specimen. Not necessary to doing the job, but necessary for being really good at it, is **a good understanding of human physiology and disease**. Biochemistry, immunology, hematology. I’m not saying you need to be a doctor to be a med tech, but if you know what sort of lab results go with kidney disease or liver disease, you can correlate the results and spot things that don’t fit. Also, it helps you spot when someone’s ordered the wrong test by mistake. Patient in the ER with a lot of reactive lymphocytes and they send a tube for Epstein-Barr antibodies, which is an expensive test we send to a reference lab. A good tech will look at that, call the ER and ask if they’re sure they don’t want a Monospot test instead. Sometimes they don’t and they yell at you for questioning them, but most of the time you’re saving time and money by looking into it. Both of those can be narrowed down to having a good “this ain’t right” detection system. Also, you need to be able to **multitask** like crazy and get used to working under too much pressure with too few people on staff. The days of being a hematology tech or chemistry tech are almost over, because everyone’s getting cross trained to be able to do almost everything, so we’re able to keep things running with fewer people. On a normal evening, I put in my antibody screens to incubate in the blood bank, go dip some urines on the urinalysis instrument and put the tubes to spin for sediment reading, then result some coagulation printouts while I wait for that to spin. And so on. You learn very quickly on the job how to squeeze the most out of your time. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/25 "2010-12-12T17:39:55Z")
Intelligence, paranoia, imagination, all round awareness, a lot of training and totally no consciounce. Also an ability to blend in . Sometimes I wish that I’d never become a milkman in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/26 "2010-12-12T21:12:52Z")
> [@WhyNot](#): > > I’m having trouble imagining any job involving working with or for other people for which these _wouldn’t_ be core skills. Not that it’s a bad list, mind, just that it’s so generic as to be much like a newspaper horoscope. At first I agreed. I thought the exercise was far too generic, and we had a fairly spirited discussion about it. That said, you might want to rethink this. Look at some of the things I posted: “- Deftness, flexibility, and skill in dealing with different types of people.” Do you actually think this is a necessary skill for most jobs? It’s not - hell, most people who work in other roles in my company don’t need this skill. I’m not just talking about not being an asshole, I mean this as one of a person’s greatst strengths, something where it would be a noteworthy trait, where you’d come away saying “That person is really, amazingly good at getting along with almost anyone.” Our accountants don’t need that skill. Our weld tech doesn’t need that skill. Everyone needs to be reasonably accomodating and nice, but does everyone need this is a premium strength? Of course not. “Strong written communications skills.” Who needs this? Do you need really good written communications skills if you’re a machinist? A receptionist? A certified phone switch tech? Nah. Maybe fewer than ten percent of people need this. “Ability to work without direct supervision” Very few people do not have a supervisor working in the same place as they do. If you take each thing I named and actually figure out what percentage of workers absolutely, positively need it, and then figure how many people have them all - well, there’s a reason my job is severely short of available labor. ---
**Author:** ![Lakai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/9de0a6/32.png) [@Lakai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lakai)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/27 "2010-12-12T21:37:10Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > If you take each thing I named and actually figure out what percentage of workers absolutely, positively need it, and then figure how many people have them all - well, there’s a reason my job is severely short of available labor. What is it that you do? ---
**Author:** ![Busy\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d78d45/32.png) [@Busy\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Busy_Scissors)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2010, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/28 "2010-12-12T23:36:34Z")
I’m a scientist - I lead a research group in chemistry in academia. There’s a lot you need to be good at to run a group that accomplishes good science, but if I had to pick one thing it would be ‘knowing what is important in science’. Sounds a bit trite, but it really is the single most important parameter that separates the men from the boys - research wise. If you can’t perceive what the research landscape looks like at any point in time, and what the big questions are in your field, then you’ll never compete. It’s not enough in itself, because you’ll then need all the other stuff (intellect, creativity, organisation, work ethic etc) to make the research happen, but it’s over-arching and it can substitute for weaknesses in other areas (e.g. stereotypes of the brilliant but disorganised prof, or the driven, managerial-style prof who’s a bit plodding intellectually - both can do important research if they have this key insight). ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/29 "2010-12-13T00:06:36Z")
> [@Lakai](#): > > What is it that you do? ISO 9001 auditor. ---
**Author:** ![HardlySanguine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/96bed5/32.png) [@HardlySanguine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HardlySanguine)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/30 "2010-12-13T01:35:11Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#): > > **The single most important skill that a designer can have is the ability to “look through” the rules** – to be able to study a design on paper and understand how it will play. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Most people can imagine how a game will play if it’s similar to something that already exists. But being able to imagine the nuances of something completely new is a lot harder. Tracing the causal connection between a particular rule and its resulting gameplay effects is often an extremely twisty and obscure process. Even inside the industry, most people can’t do it. > > But if you can, then you have a tremendously powerful tool at your disposal. Because you can use it to work _backwards_. Instead of trying a bunch of stuff at random until something works, you can deliberately design your rules to evoke a particular experience for the player. You can say “I want the game to play like THIS, so I need to have a rule over here that does THIS.” It lets you operate methodically, instead of by trial and error – which has a huge effect on finishing on time and on budget. Would it be possible for you to give a (simple) example? I’m not quite following you. (I guess I wouldn’t make a good game designer? :D) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/31 "2010-12-13T02:23:46Z")
> [@HardlySanguine](#): > > Would it be possible for you to give a (simple) example? I’m not quite following you. (I guess I wouldn’t make a good game designer? :D) When I designed the original Rainbow Six, I wanted to make the player concentrate on solving tactical puzzles instead of just running around and mindlessly blasting away. This was accomplished indirectly with a targeting mechanic that penalized the player for shooting and moving at the same time. It was intentionally designed so that you couldn’t run-and-gun out of a bad tactical situation. The mechanic made every room entry scary, because it created this little window of vulnerability as you moved through the door. As a result, it encouraged players to spend time scouting out the situation before barging in. So the entire “tactical puzzle” element of the gameplay actually hinged on getting the behavior of the targeting reticle right. Seeing how those two were connected is what I mean by “looking through” the rules. (One of my happiest days during development was a multiplayer playtest where two players stumbled onto each other rounding a corner, panic-fired, and completely missed each other at point-blank range. One of them started to bob and weave, while the other kept his cool, waited for his reticle to settle, and blew his enemy’s brains out. That was when I knew the game was going to work as designed.) ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/32 "2010-12-13T03:09:28Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > At first I agreed. I thought the exercise was far too generic, and we had a fairly spirited discussion about it. > > That said, you might want to rethink this. Look at some of the things I posted: This isn’t really the forum for debate, but yes, I still do think it’s rather generic. Switch “school” for “businesses”, and you’ve got a list for a teacher. “Hospital” and you’ve got a nurse. “Video rental industry” and you’ve got my old position as a manager of a Blockbuster. I’m sure the details differ, but the details aren’t on the list. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/33 "2010-12-13T03:16:51Z")
**Lakai** - The scenario you describe is not so much about being a “good student” so much as it is about working the system as it exists to be a successful one. All those students really learn is how to be a good drone. Those lessons can be applied in the business world as well. Whatever the “official office handbook” rules say, there are the actual rules and behaviors that are expected and accepted in any company. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/34 "2010-12-14T14:44:03Z")
> [@Lakai](#): > > As I described in the OP, being a smart student means you can do a lot less work than everyone else. That becomes a disadvantage once you go to work. Is that ever true! To be a research mathematician, you have to love it and be willing to think about something more deeply than anyone else has. But as a student I learned so easily (basically, listened in class and, although I took notes, I rarely reviewed them) that it was a shock to actually have to work hard. I have had one original idea in my career. Everything else has been to take someone else’s idea, figure out thoroughly what was behind it and run with it. I sometimes wonder what kind of career I would have had if I weren’t so lazy. The top mathematicians think about it and work on it 24/7 basically. My thesis advisor once told me that the only time he had gone a whole day not doing mathematics was on his honeymoon. That one original idea came after about five years of thinking about the problem. ot five years of concentrated work, but five years in which I cam back to it whenever there was slack time. Then it was just one simple-looking formula. Compare this with Andrew Wiles who spent seven years, barely coming for meals, sleep, and teaching his classes before being able to see his way to a solution (which still had a gap that took another year to fill, with the help of a student). Notice, incidentally, how impossible this would have been had he had to depend on funding agencies who want to see results NOW. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/35 "2010-12-14T16:53:57Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > **Lakai** - The scenario you describe is not so much about being a “good student” so much as it is about working the system as it exists to be a successful one. All those students really learn is how to be a good drone. This is a reasonable point, but I don’t think it’s universally true. I am the ‘‘good student’’ **Lakai** describes. It’s true that smart people can get away with doing less, but there are some of us out there who use that extra time\* for real, serious, engaged learning. I spent all that time not doing extraneous crap I didn’t care about learning about things that really interested me and pushing myself in the courses that mattered most. I have had the luxury, at times, of spending ridiculous amounts of time on a course or single assignment because it mattered that much to me. Being a good student didn’t make me a drone, it made me a strategic learner with the ability to prioritize where I place my greatest effort. \*Not that ‘‘extra time’’ exists in grad school. I wouldn’t ever want to imply anything so ridiculous. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/36 "2010-12-14T17:36:55Z")
> [@Richard\_Parker](#): > > Lawyer is a bit too broad a category to give a useful answer. A successful corporate attorney at a big firm might be quite different from a good public defender who in turn might have a different skillset from a virtuoso personal injury lawyer. And in any of those jobs, you might be more focused on client and case development, or legal research and writing, or actual trial advocacy – all of which require different skills, and often skills that aren’t commonly joined, like charisma and bookishness. > > Maybe other lawyers will chime in about some of these other skills. But having spent the last two years reading other lawyer’s briefs (about 300-400 of them), I’ll offer my perspective on what it takes to be good at brief-writing: > > Surprisingly, a few fundamental skills separate the top 10%-20% of legal writers from the rest. Like all writers, a lawyer must write clearly and concisely with an understanding of the reader. And clear writing requires clear thinking. > > Often, failure to think clearly is a failure of objectivity, rather than logic. A legal writer must be able to understand an argument’s weaknesses and strengths, regardless of which side is offering it. Similar objectivity is needed to read cases and accurately summarize their holdings and reasoning. Fair analysis of the precedent includes the ability to identify what is settled law and what is not. > > Finally, among the basics, I would include the recognition that the legal writer’s goal is to persuade a judge, rather than engage in needless combat with opposing counsel. Too many lawyers write as if the target audience is a drinking buddy or a debate coach instead of someone tasked with picking the winner based on who is actually correct. Lawyers tend to be combative and overly self-confident when it comes to debating ideas, so success means harnessing the useful sides of those traits while maintaining the humility necessary to be a clear thinker and persuasive writer. > > The advanced skill, which separates the top 1% from the people with a firm grasp of the basics, is the ability to craft arguments about unsettled law that are persuasive and not just convenient. In addition to making smart arguments based on synthesis of other precedents and policy implications, this means the ability to write in a persuasive style, including intelligent use of metaphor, word order, and word choice. Sometimes, a cleverly chosen, evocative analogy can make all the difference in a close case (see, e.g., the “Statue of Autocracy” argument in [Summum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasant_Grove_City_v._Summum)). > > In my experience, the best lawyers also understand what makes judges at each level tick and use those common motivations in crafting arguments. For example, recognizing that the main motivator of a trial court judge is often resolving a case as quickly and cleanly as possible, a good trial court brief-writer will provide a judge with as many easy outs as possible, and make it appear that it would be more work for the judge to take the opponent’s position. Many lawyers don’t understand that what motivates judges is often less the judge’s policy preferences and more the things that motivate everyone in their jobs: approval of supervisors (i.e. the judges who sit above them), time management, respect of colleagues, etc. Smart lawyers use those things to their advantage in deciding how to approach the argument in a case. I’d say that for a regulatory lawyer (my field), the key to being a good lawyer is the ability to distil complexity into simplicity without losing accuracy; and then, to be able to describe this accurate simplicity – persuasively. Much of goods lawyering in various fields follows that format, I suspect. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/37 "2010-12-14T17:45:34Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > **Lakai** - The scenario you describe is not so much about being a “good student” so much as it is about working the system as it exists to be a successful one. All those students really learn is how to be a good drone. Heh, I was going to comment that my approach to being a “good student” was just about the opposite. The approach advocated seems to be to conform with a prof’s expectations. My approach was to attempt whenever possible to enlist my profs to help me conform to _my_ expectations - in that I would use their services in completing projects of my own devising; that is, things I was interested in doing _anyway_. ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/38 "2010-12-14T18:19:43Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Heh, I was going to comment that my approach to being a “good student” was just about the opposite. > > The approach advocated seems to be to conform with a prof’s expectations. My approach was to attempt whenever possible to enlist my profs to help me conform to _my_ expectations - in that I would use their services in completing projects of my own devising; that is, things I was interested in doing _anyway_. Heh. I’m like you. I got to do a project on aromatherapy for Biology for Medical Majors once! Took my love of yummy smells, threw in a few references to the amygdalae, tossed in a few words like “esters” and “phenols” and Bob’s your uncle! 😃 Our approach is in the minority, but it works just as well as the drone approach, I’ve found. ---
**Author:** ![Lakai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/9de0a6/32.png) [@Lakai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lakai)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/39 "2010-12-14T18:43:47Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > **Lakai** - The scenario you describe is not so much about being a “good student” so much as it is about working the system as it exists to be a successful one. All those students really learn is how to be a good drone. > > Those lessons can be applied in the business world as well. Whatever the “official office handbook” rules say, there are the actual rules and behaviors that are expected and accepted in any company. I guess this depends on what you want to get out of school. Since I’m pretty good at learning on my own, I don’t rely on school to do that except occasionally when a good topic or professor comes my way. Like **Olives,** I use the extra time (an illusory concept in law school as well) to read nonfiction or to put more time into classes that I like. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705/40 "2010-12-14T19:30:07Z")
IT provision and support. It’s all about customer service ethic really. Technical stuff can be learned, looked up or bought in, equipment likewise, but failure to properly engage with the customer is where it usually goes wrong - meaning that either their precise needs don’t get analysed, understood and teased out of them, and they get a solution that doesn’t fit, or they are regarded as the enemy, kept at arm’s length, treated with disdain, and everything ends up being a conflict. The way to do the job well is to get alongside the customer. Everything else can be worked out quite easily. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-someone-good-at-your-profession/563705.md?page=3)