The Difference Between Saying and Actually Being...

I don’t intent for this to be a place where I harp on about things that bug me but one thought that I wanted to get off my chest is what I loosely call “the difference between saying and actually being.” I come across this phenomena often as I am someone who leads a passionate, adventure filled life that often involves doing “dangerous” and different things. I do things that a lot of people don’t so it is always exciting for me when I meet someone who has similar interests, knowledge, experience etc. The trouble is that in this age of arm chair adventurers I find the quantity of people who claim to know something and those who actually do know something to be quite low. It is especially important when lives are on the line to “under promise and over deliver”.

Let’s take, for example, an aspect of my profession - rigging. I am constantly being sent resumes from folks who want to work for my company which is great (keep ‘em coming). A few years ago when I had a lot less rigging knowledge than I do today I would often be in a position of needing to hire these types of people to get jobs done. I would conduct an interview, ask a few questions, explain the work and then I would assume that this ”rigger“ had all the knowledge necessary to make the job happen. It wasn’t until a few stressful situations involving deadlines and screaming clients (no falling bodies) that I realized that my personal self classification as ”non-rigger“ was in fact a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than many of the people who claimed to be riggers. It was around that time that I started taking courses, found some terrific rigging mentors and built up my own skills and the skills of my team so that we could often do the work ourselves. I still make a point of hiring folks who are way, way smarter and more experienced than I am whenever I can in order to increase overall safety and glean even more valuable knowledge. The difference now is that I can easily see who these people with real knowledge are almost immediatly. This is really important for someone like me who flies human bodies off building roof tops. Even so I feel that it is a skill that I still need to work on and not take for granted. Gee, I wonder how many less rigging resumes I’ll get in my inbox this week?

I used rigging as an example but I can think of many more. It seems to me that the more exotic the sport or discipline the more a certain type of person wants to be associated with it. I think that is great to want to be a part of something and learn but I fear that there must be a lot of people who get hurt every year because, for whatever reason, they claim or are perceived to be more proficient at something than they really are. I, in fact spent a good deal of my younger life pretending to know a lot of things. Eventually I became a little wiser and realized that this was boring because I wasn’t actually learning anything at all. Now I go about things the opposite way. Even if I feel that I know something (or a lot of somethings) about a subject I will still go out of my way to find mentors and ask way too many questions from people I deem to have more knowledge. How else can I claw back all that time that I spent pretending to know it all myself. I’m 38 years old and I need to take any legitimate shortcuts to success that I can. I am finding that it is also a lot more fun this way!