Uhm, yeah, I can. She strikes me as the kind of person that if you told her there was no way she could hump 50 pounds of gear in the blazing heat, she'd do it just so she could spit in your face at the end of it. That said, I take your point. She doesn't look like she could do that.
I don't look like I could finish a marathon. (Some would argue that I can't.)
I know a bunch of Navy Seals. They all look fit and tough, but I couldn't pick the ones that are going to finish Seal training out of a group of other fit military men based on looks alone. Being able to do this stuff is partially mental.
OK - bragging post - a former Navy Seal once said to me, and I quote, "That's some very good situational awareness." It ranks up there with the time an Irish maternity nurse called me a hard (rhymes with class) as one of the best compliments I've ever received.
Oh this is such a fun topic! How people respond in a crisis is one of the most fascinating things to me. I have been with Ivy League folks who absolutely could not handle pressure and I have been with people of modest intellectual capabilities who were superb in a crisis. I was really worried about how I would respond in a crisis. I remember being abjectly terrified of doing chest compressions on a baby in a code situation. It weighed on my mind when I first started in the NICU. I wasn't the world's greatest clinical student. There are two types of clinicians, the technicians and the theoreticians. I was firmly in the latter camp as a student. I was our valedictorian but I was one of the worst students in clinical. I'm not the type who learns via a hands-on style. I need the theory and to make connections and really understand things from a theoretical perspective. I remember after my first code being surprised that I just jumped in and did what I was supposed to do. That was a big turning point in my career. I could do what needed to be done and didn't need to be told when or how to do it. I really had my doubts before that.
I dated this girl in high school whose father was this big burly ex-UT linesman. He could not deal with the sight of blood. We were water skiing at possum kingdom one day and my girlfriend got her finger caught between the skis and rope and it took all her skin off one finger. Not a life or death situation but it was pretty nasty. Anyway, he fainted and I jumped in the water.
Obviously not a hugely consequential event but I was amazed at how this guy was not only useless but made the situation worse because he had to be tended to as well and couldn’t drive the boat home. I mean, he couldn’t help it but, yeesh, I thought parental protection instinct would kick in.
This is neither here nor there but I’ve noticed in the past year that I have a real issue mixing up homophones.
Something that always fascinates me is just how bad most people are at placing their abilities in context with the abilities of their peers. People who are not as skilled as their peers have a tendency to overrate themselves and underrate those who are more skilled than they are. They tend to see everyone as existing in the same plane. Those who are extraordinary skilled can suffer from two problems. They can assume everyone else is just as skilled as they are, thereby underrating themselves and overrating their peers. Or they can come to believe that no one else is as skilled as they are. I think I'm pretty good at evaluation oh, and I think that comes from playing point guard. Or maybe I'm fantastically bad at it and just don't know.
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and other books, reads the first chapter of his next book, The Preminition: A Pandemic Story, in the latest episode of his Against the Rules podcast. In it he covers the story of a county Chief Health Officer. She draws a similar conclusion, the big burly dudes are good for moving stuff, etc. but quite useless in myriad other situations requiring bravery.
Ok - you are imagining something way different than what the reality was, so, I'll tell you. The Navy Seal and I were on the same team in a trivia contest conducted between the 1st and 2nd periods of a Harvard hockey game. One of the questions was "How many Ivy League Championships have been won by the Harvard men's hockey team?" and I looked up at the Ivy League Champions banner hanging above the rink and counted the years listed on the men's side. I said however many it was, he said, "How did you know that?" I pointed to the banner and said, "I counted." He looked at me with what I remember as a fair bit of admiration and said, "That's some very good situational awareness." (I do find in life that I am more aware of my surroundings than the average person.)
The Irish maternity nurse gave me the complement when I had to go to the NICU to nurse T-Bone (his birth was an emergency situation and he spent 2 days in the NICU), she said that they could get me a wheelchair and I responded with, "I can walk!" and she responded with, "Oh, you're a hard _ _ _" and I said, "Thank you."
The biggest takeaway from this pandemic for me is going to be that I like way fewer people than I thought I did. And I don't think it's ever coming back. It's always going to linger in the back of my mind that there was a group of people who didn't care about other people. And this is not public policy, this is science. Lest anyone get upset.