“Are you messing with me private?” These words were shouted at me by a drill instructor at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1992. Part of my training in the Army included a course called Visual Aircraft Recognition. In this thrilling class, an instructor puts a picture of an aircraft on the screen and you have to write down the model of the aircraft and whether or not it’s friendly or enemy. As you can imagine, this training can be pretty important to somebody who is carrying anti-aircraft missiles.

In school, I usually got good grades, never did much homework, always managed to get at least a B (until college anyway) and was generally considered one of the smarter kids in school. Yet, here I was, in a class of 250 soldiers from all walks of life and I am one of only five people who flunked the exam. I eventually passed it (which should be a little bit unnerving to those of you interested in our national security) because that same drill instructor stood behind me and made sure that I wrote down the correct answers on the re-test.

The surprising thing is not that I flunked the class; the surprising thing is that I flunked the class after studying for hours and hours in the barracks. I was in the dark looking at slides with a flashlight hours after everybody else had gone to sleep. I spent every available hour looking at those slides trying to memorize those airplanes and helicopters to no avail. C130, Chinook, F16, F111, F18, MIG 21’s, they all looked the same no matter how hard I studied. I was up all night studying while every other person was sleeping – they all passed – I flunked.

I had a salesman quit this week after I called him to ask how he was doing. “I’m just not any good at sales,” he told me. This particular salesperson has a five-year history of making six figures with my company. “I hate my job and I’m going to find something else to do for a living.” He had spent the last five years rolling along, cashing nice paychecks and taking orders from customers, living very comfortably. All of a sudden his customers stopped buying as much, his paychecks dwindled and he was forced to go find some new business to replace what he had lost. Finding new business proved to be impossible for him. He developed at least a thousand leads, did a few hundred bids and nothing came…. nothing. All of a sudden, somebody who was once one of the most successful people in our company was struggling to get a paycheck … any paycheck.

The collapse of the building market taught this person that although he had been making a nice living as a salesperson, he was not any good at sales. How many people like this exist at your company? When was the last time you heard a little kid say that when he grows up he wants to work at a lumberyard? Most of the people who work for you do so because they need a paycheck and very few of your people truly love what they do for a living. I’m certain that nobody grew up dreaming of doing blueprint takeoffs for residential homebuilders. All of us landed in this industry because we were looking for any job that pays the bills after we dropped out of college (or graduated for you over achievers out there), or because our families were in the business.

Nonetheless we find ourselves in a bad spot on the timeline of our industry. Those of us who truly love what we do will be fine – long term – no matter what. Those who don’t are probably wishing they had studied harder when they were younger.

The Army, to its credit, realized that if I were firing Stinger missiles there would be a colossal expense and likely loss of life. When I got to Fort Stewart, Ga., after training was completed, I was immediately assigned to the paperwork division and eventually became a secretary/driver for a Lieutenant Colonel. This particular job, in times of peace, required me to do three things: type, drive, and miss 2-foot putts on the 18th hole so Colonel Newman won the golf game. The Army realized that while I may have been in the wrong job, I still had value to the collective organization. I enjoyed a nice three-year career as a secretary and never once fired a stinger missile or was asked to identify an aircraft. Maybe in your organization there are people who need a change. Salespeople who can’t sell might still have a value to your company, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want them out on the front lines … people might get hurt.