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It is a lot easier to find an educated person than a person whose motivation lasts long enough to make up for the education though.
That said, I've found myself in both camps on various projects. When you're working on something where the end result is really exciting, it makes a huge difference on you and your team. It's exhilarating. On the flip side, projects were you don't care about the end result, are really brutal to work through. You just work for the paycheck. Any sort of educating about how to do things better feels particularly pointless.
A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the present, even if that education is going to be by necessity a very narrow one (typically: job specific).
Being hungry for money and creature comforts also tends to be conflated with being motivated ('ambitious'), but it doesn't really align well because once financial success (for some very modest success) is attained the motivation will vanish. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it tends to confuse people who were not aware of the driving power being the outwardly visible motivation.
The movie 'Rush' has a nice bit about that, James Hunt just wants to be WDC, once. He doesn't care about anything past that point because it will give him what he wants. But until he's got it he will be super motivated.
Doing involves a lot of implicit knowledge that reading frequently fails to cover. There's a density of information in doing that reading sometimes lacks. There are good points and bad points to that.
You have to have some implicit knowledge of how things work in order first...but that doesn't always come from formal education.
The problem with this phrasing is it implies that motivation is an inherent aspect of individuals. Nobody is a do-er. Motivation is impacted by a variety of factors.
The Doer in his ignorance, will embark on a trip of endlessly trying satisfy his boss, thinking that they are making progress, but they are not.
The problem with this phrasing is it implies that motivation is an inherent aspect of individuals. Nobody is a do-er. Motivation is impacted by a variety of factors.
Doing involves a lot of implicit knowledge that reading frequently fails to cover. There's a density of information in doing that reading sometimes lacks. There are good points and bad points to that.
I would say there is no way to 100% cover with reading what you need to learn on the job. Also there is no way to cover some concepts with 100% on the job training (much harder to make a HS grad a petroleum engineer by just throwing them on a platform in the gulf without any formal education). You have to have some implicit knowledge of how things work in order first...but that doesn't always come from formal educati…
I suspect this is a root cause of a lot of social and political friction. Doing or showing is sometimes the only hope of getting past that.
Alternative take: in the hiring process education is often used as a proxy for motivation, when actually it only proves that once upon a time someone was motivated long enough to get educated, but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation. A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the prese…
If you take the set of all applicants with education and the set of all applicants without, would you claim there is no difference in the distributions of 'do-er'-ness?