Hockey University
Gilles McTavish was a promising young hockey player, identified at age seven playing in the Tim Horton’s league. His coaches said he was one of the best they’d ever seen. He paid close attention to instruction and could parrot back everything he was told, word for word. Bright boy indeed.
As you can imagine, his parents were intensely proud of their little prodigy and began to invest all kinds of time and money into developing Gilles. After-school classes and summer camp – nothing was too good for their boy.
And so it was in due course he went off to Hockey University to earn his National Hockey League certification. Over the next four years he applied himself well, never missed a class, and aced every exam. He took awards for his marks in Hockey History, The Psychology of Goaltending, Anatomy and Physiology for Athletes, and published an award-winning article entitled, “Equity and Diversity Issues in the NHL”.
The program was rigorous and demanding, but he aced every exam and finally, after all the time, money, and effort, received a ribbon-festooned certificate declaring him eligible to play in any professional hockey league in the world.
Based on his marks and his awards, every team in the League tried to recruit him, with the usual salary offers, shiny new cars, and signing bonuses. Toronto, hoping to clinch its first Stanley Cup in centuries, was the lucky winner.
Of course by now you’re snorting in derision. “Come on, Norm, get real! That’s not how you become a professional hockey player!”
And you’d be right.
In all the non-credentialed professions you fly or you die based on your skills and aptitudes. Sure, you take a lot of coaching along the way, and the path to stardom is a grueling one, but there are no exams and no certificates. You’re a pro because of what you do, not because of your ability to cram for exams.
Oddly enough, in the credentialed professions we have a different approach. It’s still entirely possible to become certified as a lawyer in most provincial and state bars without ever having set foot in a courtroom, interviewed a client, or drafted pleadings. Many other professions also reward the cram artists with little regard for demonstrated competence. Mercifully, doctors and dentists actually require their young to roll up their sleeves and learn to do “stuff”, although even there you’re mostly in or out based on your ability to regurgitate on exams.
This is not to discount “subject matter expertise”. If you’re going to draft trust deeds, you’d better know about the “three certainties”. If you’re designing a thirty storey building, one has to hope you know a thing or two about the bearing weights and stress characteristics of the building materials. Subject matter knowledge often is a life or death matter. But it’s not what makes you a professional.
Being a professional is about your ability to apply what you have learned, whether in criminal court or on a tennis court, and your ability to apply has mostly to do with innate aptitudes. The sad truth, though, is that we generate hundreds of thousands of young people, at enormous time and money costs to themselves and society, who have absolutely no aptitude for their trades. Lawyers without people skills or problem solving aptitude. Engineers who couldn’t fix a flat tire if their lives depended on it. Doctors who don’t drill down to discover the underlying issue, instead handing out pills to manage symptoms.
Worse, after having spent a quarter of their expected lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting the plaque on the wall, these young people are doomed to grind out the rest of their lives doing “stuff” for which they have little aptitude or excitement, at perpetual risk of professional negligence, receiving little gratification, essentially chained to their miserable galley ship until either it sinks or they accumulate enough savings to retire. Not much of a life, is it?
Do we need to talk?