
25 years ago i heard a story that miles davis picked a musician for his band without even hearing him play
just the way the guy was setting up-
the way he handled his instrument
told davis all he needed to know
now that might be apocryphal- i can't find it with google as of today
but at the time- i remember trying to isolate one trait for the workplace
i had a dozen ideas and discarded them all
until coming up with..
what they did/produced when they thought no one was watching
but even that was problematic
there was this one guy who would sit in his office
looking asleep- almost droolign and snoring
to the point where i'm like

but first thing next moring he'd put a report on my desk that had me like

solving a big problem that had confused a dozen different people
meanwhile this woman used to buzz around like the tasmanian devil
she'd be at her desk at 5 am, 7 pm, skipping lunch breaks, putting inwork
printing out draft after draft after draft
..but her output was marginal at best
i don't know.. maybe the sleepy guy would have been curing cancer if he went full tilt
and maybe working her heart out was the only way for that woman to obtain any results whatsoever

it's really, really hard to generalize a person from a handful of traits or habits
i don't think i'm a special snowflake or whatever
but people have frequently miscalculated my real intentions
