Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use ItTrabue, Marion Rex
Science
Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use It
Trabue, Marion Rex
Educational tests and measurements; Intelligence tests; Psychological tests
There is, moreover, no guarantee that even an experienced person in a
special sort of work is fitted to do that particular work as well as it
can be done or should be done. He or she may have got into that sort of
work by accident. That is usually the way in which a boy or girl begins
a business or industrial career. He or she may have continued in it
merely because the experience gained in the first job enables its
possessor to pass the superficial scrutiny of foremen, managers, or
others who employ “help” in the first instance. But just as all the
experience and training in the world will not make a Paderewski out of a
person who was not born with the precise combination of sensory and
nervous qualities that the master musician possesses, though almost any
one with ten fingers and an ear for harmony can be taught to play the
piano after a fashion, so it is true that while in the all-important
business of earning a living almost anybody can be trained to do most of
the ordinary manufacturing and business operations, after a fashion, it
is only those who were born with certain combinations of nerve endings
and sensory apparatus who can be trained into first-rate salesmen, or
expert tool-makers. And this holds true all the way down the line, to
the simplest and most automatic operations necessary in business
industry.
Individuals themselves are seldom aware of their own capacities; even
less generally of their own limitations. Occasionally, by accident, a
man or a woman finds at the right time the opportunity to do precisely
the things he or she is best fitted to do. Often the individual’s strong
personal instincts or inclinations lead him or her to seek opportunity
to do certain kinds of work without any clear understanding why that
sort of work appeals while other kinds do not. Few human beings analyze
their inclinations closely. Yet it may be and frequently is the case
that the work one most strongly desires to undertake is not that in
which he or she is best fitted to succeed. The inclination may be
counterbalanced by inhibitions of which neither the possessor nor his or
her employer becomes aware until repeated failure has demonstrated the
lack of adaptability, sometimes after it is, or seems to be, too late to
take up another occupation. Then the worker usually drifts into the
ranks of “casuals,” constantly moving from job to job, chronically “out
of work”; the ready dupe of agitators and the prophets of social unrest
and revolution; disheartened, anti-social, and perennially unhappy; the
most expensive sort of an employee in any position, no matter how small
the wage—yet a human being, and, as such, entitled to liberty and the
pursuit of happiness!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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