Baseball and Engineering

It's World Series time of the year.  In the book The Signal and Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't, author Nate Silver provides a list of  five different intellectual and psychological abilities that he believes help to predict success at the major-league level.  The list is also insightful for engineers, doctors, and bankers - - anyone wanting to play in their own major league.

1. Preparedness and Work Ethic - - Baseball is unlike almost all other professional sports in that games are played six or seven times a week.  A baseball player can't get "amped up" for game day as a football or basketball player might; he has to be ready to perform at a professional level every day.  This means he must have a certain amount of discipline.  For an engineer, that discipline must be in place for a 50-year career. 
2. Concentration and Focus - - Although related to preparedness, this category specifically concerns the manner in which a player conducts himself during the course of the game.  Baseball is a reflex sport.  A hitter has about three tenths of a second to decide whether to swing at a pitch; an infielder has to react to a sharply hit grounder as soon as it comes off the bat.  Baseball is sport requiring energized focus - - so do all of the professions.  Having open heart surgery - - the term "energized focus" in the context of your doctor is probably a really good thing to hear.  The same with the engineer designing the bridge you plan to drive across.
3. Competitiveness and Self-Confidence - - While it may seem like a given that any professional athlete would be a natural-born competitor, baseball players must overcome self-doubt and other psychological obstacles in the early stages of their careers.  One moment, they were the king of the hill in high school; the next, they are riding buses between Kannapolis and Greensboro, reading about their failures on the Internet each time they go into a slump.  Every single aspect of engineering is a contest.  Sometimes people don't understand this until it is too late.
4. Stress Management and Humility - - In baseball, even the best hitters fail a majority of the time, and every player will enter a slump at certain points during the season.  The ability to cope with this failure requires a short memory and a certain sense of humor.  Engineering and medicine have several things in common.  One is that both professions have to have individuals with strong coping skills - - the ability to deal with failure. 
5. Adaptiveness and Learning Ability - - How successfully is the player able to process new information during the game?  Listen to advice from his coaches?  How does he adapt when his life situation changes?  What if he's traded - or asked to play a new position?  The path between amateur ball and the major league is rarely linear even for the most talented prospects - and so a great player can't be too rigid in this mental approach.  Engineers probably wrote the book on rigid - - in periods of transformative change, a little adaptiveness will make us all better major league professionals.