The 10 Key

These days I often find myself using the 10 key on my keyboard at work. It’s faster for me when I’m entering a lot of numbers at once. But every time I do, I’m reminded of my first temp job. I was about an hour into working there, and I was entering a lot of data into the computer. I was not in the habit of using the 10 key at the time. The admin assistant who was “managing” me gave me a look, a look that I’ll never forget, and said “you don’t use the 10 key?”

At that precise moment I knew I wasn’t going to last very long at that assignment. I was right.

Looking back, being good at using the 10 key was pretty much irrelevant to what I was doing for that company. For me, it’s a great example of how we decide that people are or aren’t able to do a job based on skills that are totally irrelevant. Or we dismiss capable people because they don’t have skills that can be taught – even though they do have the skills that can’t.

The young man in me – who was desperate to be given a chance professionally so I could spread my wings and show what I could really do – feels the frustration that I felt then, when people in the position to hire me didn’t see (what to me was obvious) that I could learn the skills they needed for the job quickly. That I could excel at anything, given the chance. I just wanted a chance.

Yet I’m also reminded of the film producer I worked with that only knew how to sell action films. He and I had worked on a couple projects together, and I had spent a bit of time telling him how his model for financing films could be applied to movies of other genres. His response, at the end, was “But I don’t know how to sell those movies. I know how to sell action films, so those are the ones I make.”

Some people only know how to sell action films. Some people only know how to capitalize on really specific skill sets, and those skill sets need to be presented to them. They can’t teach them, they may not even really know how to measure them. But when they have access to them, they can capitalize on them.

That’s all I have for now. Just a few observations, about work.