You’d Make a Good President

Or maybe a good fashion photographer. Or a good shortstop. The point is, you have no idea.

By: Chuck Klosterman

Last February, I stumbled across a short news story that — at first glance — seemed only mildly entertaining and mostly innocuous. It was only interesting because it was weird. But I can’t stop thinking about this particular article. These are the opening paragraphs, as they appeared online:

London (AP) — Answering a nationwide appeal for tall people with athletic potential, more than 50 prospective Olympic athletes have been placed in British training programs for the 2012 London Games.

More than 3,800 people applied to be part of the “Sporting Giants” project. They were tested for their skills in four Olympic sports — rowing, handball, beach volleyball and indoor volleyball.

Making the cut were 34 rowers, 11 handball players and seven volleyball players. They have been integrated into various British Olympic training squads.

“There are so many people out there who don’t know how good they could be at sports they’ve probably not even thought about,” UK Sport talent identification manager Chelsea Warr said Thursday. “This was a mild shake of the tree. We looked under a few rocks and look what we found.”

I find this information fascinating, and not just because I’m the coauthor of an upcoming 677-page book tentatively titled Future Legends of British Handball. What intrigues me is the brilliantly simplistic premise of the British experiment — it eradicated the role of self-selection from the process of achievement. Now, I realize that sentiment sounds borderline draconian. But the technique might be rewarding in a lot of contexts that have nothing to do with skeletal frames or volleyball. The Sporting Giants project operated on the belief that the average tall person in London might not realize he was perfectly designed to excel at an activity he’d never even considered. It seems possiblethat this same logic could apply to most human endeavors. Because most people don’t know what they’re good at.

Imagine you are Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves.

Imagine that your fictional high school experience is almost over. You have just been thrown off the football team for criticizing Craig T. Nelson’s skepticism of Scientology, and your life will now take one of two paths: Either you will a) take a job at the local steel mill and remain trapped in your depressing Pennsylvania town, or b) earn a scholarship and pursue your adolescent love of mechanical engineering. In the first case, you have no agency over the decision that will define your existence. In the second situation, you get to pick how you will try to make a living — even though you really have no idea how good an engineer you will be or how much you will enjoy the actual work. In the former scenario, your life follows the path of least resistance; in the latter scenario, you’ll invest years of energy and thought toward a vocation you wanted at the age of seventeen but might despise when you’re thirty-seven. Either way, you’ll inadvertently ignore all the other careers that might suit your skill set far better (Navy pilot, Nascar driver, annoying Kokomo bartender, bisexual vampire, etc.).

Catch the Rest here.