Reading the post Rave-Off from thirteen years ago it all came back to me again, the things I knew in my job not from brilliance but from dull repetition. I recalled that students and new hires would be rather amazed at what I could predict in advance, what I could conclude from stray comments (from patients, from other agencies, from families) that turned out to be true 48 hours later.
I would say that we all get like this at jobs we are familiar with, but then I think of others in my department who had also done the job for years. Most could not do this. It doesn't feel like I was all that smart, just paying attention.
There is another side to this, the complete disbelief you get from people that you are able to do this...when it concerns them. I don't think I read motives and make predictions all that brilliantly. No one does. Yet somehow I'm the smart kid in the dumb row here and find that the obvious seems to be eluding many others.
2 comments:
When I had been an EMT for a couple of years, I noticed that some very experienced medics could do this and some could not. I asked a guy who'd been doing the job for quite a while about it and he replied, "There's a difference between 10 years of experience and one year of experience ten times."
Good pattern recognition is a marker for high IQ (So I've been told) so you're probably an abnormally (!) smart guy!
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