The struggles of employment you mentioned reminds me of my mother. She is an incredibly intelligent woman and that has harmed her. She raised 4 children alone after my father abandoned us (while she was giving birth to the 4th child and when the oldest was 5 years old). She had to work 2 jobs at less than minimum wage to make ends meet and still struggled to stay employed. Her struggles were not despite the fact that she was far more intelligent than her boss or any of her peers, it was directly related to that fact. She wasn’t arrogant, but she was dumbfounded by the prevalence of ignorance and the fact that the business has persisted in its midst. She didn’t say anything, but they were likely aware of her perceptions. I couldn’t understand the problem until years later when I saw that it was frequently the least intelligent that had no problem keeping their jobs when the more intelligent and business savvy personnel were “laid off” or fired.

I had a difficult time getting a job after a tour with the army, but I needed to work, so I took all the spot jobs mowing lawns and other day labor positions, while seeking those management positions for which I was trained. God blessed me with those hard times to humble me and make me grateful for any job I could get. I started seeing that compétence wasn’t enough to stay employed in those times. It took a friendly personality and humility. People had to want to work with you. I learned to make people feel good about themselves while encouraging them to improve and excel i their jobs.

I learned that all sorts of people have value on business and a good manager will learn to value them and use their value for the benefit of the business.

I hired a lot of people throughout my management years, but I would usually rather hire a person with little skill, but a great attitude and a sense of humility and gratitude than somebody who was the most qualified expert with an arrogant spirit and absence of entitlement. I could always train and move low skilled people around if they could maintain the right spirit. The other type only makes others not want to work with them.

Not that you had the drawbacks that sometimes develop with great intelligence and skills, but sometimes people feel intimidated by the nicest of people who are far more qualified for a position than they are.

I understand the consternation. When my children were young, they got pretty much straight “A”s and we moved around a lot ( staying employed and trying to improve our situation. (My wife and I were very involved in their education and taught them much more than the schools taught them). At one point we determined that the public school was doing one of them harm beyond what we were able to mitigate so we ended up home schooling her. Although she got straight “A”s in the first semester, we determined that we needed to start the year over in January and actually teach her what she needed to learn. We spent 12 hrs per day teaching her the whole year in 5 months and tested her with the international standards test and found that in all her subjects she was in the 90th percentile or better for children at her age.

The following year she was able to complete all her school work in 3 hrs each day on average. One day, I took her to the store to purchase something. We got the item to the register and the cashier (probably in her 20s) rang it up. It cost something like $1.71 and I gave her $2.21. She accidentally rang in 20.21 and looked panicked. She was saying “uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh” and shifting her eyes between the register and me. My daughter and I noticed this and I said, “is there a problem?” She explained what the problem was and that she didn’t know what to do. I asked my daughter how she would make change for the $2.21 if the item cost $1.71 and she said, “I’d give back two quarters”. I said, “that’s right, the item costs $1.71 plus the 50 cents change back equals the amount the customer gave: $2.21”. I looked up at the cashier and said that’s what I would do. She stared back at me for a minute looking unsure. Then she pulled out a quarter, hesitated and then pulled out another quarter and slowly handed them to me and said, “I hope that’s right?”

Public school fails our youth, but they do a great job of indoctrinating them. I didn’t do this to embarrass this young lady, but as an opportunity to see if my 12 year old had really learned these basic math skills enough to apply them to real life and to show her the value of them.