The Knack
When the typical markers of success and achievement just don’t tell the whole story
When Ben Cichy, the Senior Director of Lunar Program Engineering at Blue Origin, posted on social media that his 2.4 GPA in his first semester in college, thousands of comments poured in. These messages of assumed failure leading to real success restores our hope, and that feels good.
Got a 2.4 GPA my first semester in college. Thought maybe I wasn’t cut out for engineering. Today I’ve landed two spacecraft on Mars, and am now designing one for the Moon.
STEM is hard for everyone. Grades ultimately aren’t what matter. Curiosity and perseverance matter. @bencichy
We love a good Cinderella story, rooting for the underdog, and beating the Goliaths of the world — real as well as imagined. We use these stories to motivate ourselves and our loved ones. Such anecdotes serve to keep us going when we want to quit, to have faith in ourselves when our situations seem hopeless.
@bentleyoakdude commented that he “clipped and sent to my sophomore engineering daughter on the eve of a calculus test.”
Some more cynical types replied that grades do, in fact, matter. Period.
While Cichy’s brief post is encouraging, he missed the mark, and he left out the most crucial piece. It is true that grades are not proxies for our interests, abilities, potential, or values; it is also true that we are not all cut out for all things.
What I wish Cichy had said is curiosity and perseverance will carry you through tough times and roadblocks when your work really matters to you.
Alternatively, curiosity and perseverance will be impossible to drum up when you’re not interested in, or in alignment doing, the work.
Our society puts a high premium on certain successful-sounding jobs, engineering being one of them. It sounds cool to say you put a spacecraft on Mars, and lots of young people will read this and think, yeah, that sounds like something I could do. But in reality, tweeting that this is what you do is a lot easier than actually doing the work that Cichy did. To do this work — to do any work — is a pleasure when we’re aligned and a drag when we’re not. This alignment is sometimes called a knack. When we have a knack for something, it comes so naturally to us that we can’t imagine doing anything else. This doesn’t mean it will always be easy, rather, it will always be a knack — something we seem to be uniquely designed to do — even when the going gets tough.
The great sadness is that so many of us never discover our knacks because we lack exposure and self-awareness — the two essential ingredients to any fulfilling career and life. We need to know what an engineer does and we need to know what our unique gifts are — then and only then can we ascertain our “fit” for the career.
Perhaps the daughter of @bentleyoakdude needs to hear that she should do what she really wants to do not only what sounds like the path to success and greatness. Or maybe she did need that nudge of encouragement from her parent the night before her big test, and she’ll become the next great engineer our world needs.
Alex Ellison is the author of Go Your Own Way: 7 Student-Centered Paths to the Best College Experience, and the creator of the Student Archetype Quiz. She works with families, schools, businesses, and non profits to promote healthier approaches to college and career planning.
