it says here in training for general ship it seems that intellectual ability has not always counted for very much even hague the educated soldier became commander-in-chief of the british army in the first world war despite a poor academic record this dowerlin scott this tower lowland scott described by duff cooper as the dunce of the family and by lord george as utterly stupid so you are getting some dumb people here um fast forward a little certainly a brilliant performance in military schools is no guarantee of subsequent ability general kali whose secession of defeats culminated in 1881 in his own demise at mujaba hill had the distinction of passing out of staff college with the highest marks on record the irrelevance of early scholarship to subsequent general ship also finds support in napoleon and wellington both of whom achieved very low grades at school and in more recent times the early academic brilliance of lieutenant general percival evidently availed him little at singapore so he’s given all these other examples right you got percival who led that total disaster in singapore who was uh academically brilliant napoleon and wellington who were great generals who were junk at school and another guy general cauley who is a disaster on the battlefield and yet had the highest marks on record so the statement is like hey you could be really smart and do well you could be really smart and do horrible you could be moderately smart and do well you could be moderately smart and do horrible so i think the statement here is like well it’s not intellect is only part of it right intellect is only part of it what about um fighter pilots i mean look so in the seal teams for a while they were recruiting these really really smart ivy league you know harvard yale there was all this whole crew of officers that were coming in they were clearly highly intellectual smart people and they stopped recruiting those people so heavily and the reason they stopped recruiting those people so heavily was two reasons one was they would do their one platoon or two platoons and get out and go to business school or whatever and two was they weren’t that good yeah there was no there was no correlation to someone that was really smart to someone that was a really good leader on the battlefield yeah i i think it’s the same i really do i i don’t think i don’t think the personality profile you know or even just the motivational profile of of a lot of people in the military is all that different certainly when i think about seals and pilots and as often as you and i kind of contrast those two types of people there’s a ton of similarity there and you know the different services in aviation have different sets of of requirements and you know i think the marine corps has the the lowest i guess standard of academic excellence uh in terms like what you studied and how well you did i mean the old joke in the marine corps was you know if you got a 2 0 and underwater basket weaving you could be a pilot you know is the joke and you know what they were saying really was hey you know we don’t really care what you studied now you gotta have a college degree and i think that does demonstrate some willingness and ability and i’m not sure which is more important to get through a long-term project that hey i’m going to dedicate four years to getting this degree that demonstrates hey you’ve got some planning you’ve got some interest you’ve got some intellect something that’s going to reveal that you’re you are have something that’s going to be hard to do you’re going gonna be willing to do that you’re getting a 4 0 you know in uh you know aerodynamics versus a 2 0 in poli-sci we don’t really care yeah that was kind of the marine corps general approach a little bit different for the other services but i was kind of laughing and kind of thinking about this thing from a larger standpoint of these great military leaders that maybe didn’t have the best records academically i mean the two thoughts that i had is the academics in the military aren’t that hard they’re not that hard you know what i mean like you don’t need to be a genius to get perfect scores on your tests um and i think the ones that don’t do that well academically that are that still really do well there’s probably a piece in there they’re thinking like this is dumb this is a waste of my time what’s the what’s the minimum grade requirement yeah cool i’m going to get that and there that actually reveals some level of intelligence i’m not going to waste my time and all this stuff that i don’t really want to be doing but i’m not going to fail either so for for you to sort of explain there’s some really good leaders that didn’t do so hot and then there’s some guys that just were absolutely brilliant on paper that were terrible that is not a stretch for me at all to picture that in in aviation or anywhere in the middle term like i think i know who those guys are yeah and really in anything anything there’s no there i’m trying to think of a job where the full where where the the primary thing is only intelligence only intelligence i’m sure there’s some laboratory somewhere or some computer programming thing where basically the smartest person is the person that we want in that job yeah but as soon as that person is in charge of people anyone else totally or in certain as soon as there’s some level of creativity or problem solving because there’s you just you what you want is a person that the composite has a bunch of different skills i mean you would think for being a pilot uh there’s got to be you know that that like the spatial like when i took the officer candidate test and you’ve got to do the spatial recognition where how far away is this or is this aircraft or is this bird coming to you or going away from you got to tell from looking at it hey obviously someone could be really really smart and suck at that test right not to mention eyesight not to mention reaction time like all those different things and then it’s the same thing with leadership you can have someone that’s super articulate there’s there’s really articulate people that aren’t really that smart i mean i served with some people like that they’re really articulate they can put a word word together what do people call them when eel you know that’s a skill set that like a salesperson there’s really good sales people they’re not the smartest people in the world but they’re incredible at their incredible conversationalists yeah right but you wouldn’t want to put them into a situation where they’ve got to stand up and talk in front of people if they don’t have that skill so just because someone is smart that’s only like one quarter of the of the of the math we got to do here totally and when you’re thinking about it from a leadership standpoint and the recognition that that leadership requires a whole bunch of different things not just being smart and taking a test or being good at communicating it’s the recognition that it requires so many different things none of these these profiles that he just revealed are a big shock to me i’m like yep yep yep those all make sense seals pilots everywhere in between and yeah in aviation is there a couple things that might incline you down that path like if you can naturally get a sense if they show you a diagram of an airplane descending turning and slow and then you have to match it up that some people’s brains may be oh i can’t i can’t see that as well as somebody else yeah i could see that and that’s gonna account for a small part of it that might be good to know but that by itself is it’s gonna it’s gonna have almost no influence in the long-term success of this person in his career in the military that i could identify relatively early on of what the spatial orientation of an airplane was in relation to the ground do you want that yeah that’s a good idea i don’t want someone who who gets confused you don’t want someone that’s totally lost right i mean even on that test you all you have to do is pass it right oh that’s all you have to do and then you know if you and i were in the same thing and i was a little bit worse i would study it more i figured out more or i just after whatever two months of looking at that stuff we’re the same yes because i figured out how to figure it out yeah that’s right check
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