Blue Collar Brilliance Summary

Intelligence is not what one can acquire from books, but how one can effectively react to non-receptive content. In the article “Blue-collar Brilliance”, Mike Rose contends that workers in the professional field are not more resourcefully adequate than blue-collar and service workers. Being successful in the labor or service field requires the same set of mind tools as doctors, lawyers, scientists, and other professionals. The way a doctor generates a diagnosis based on intuition and medical credentials is the same way a mechanic generates a diagnosis on a vehicle based on sound and mechanic accreditation, yet we presume the doctor’s in-grained mental capacity is exceedingly advanced because of his educational background. Blue collar workers develop exclusive …show more content…
However, these are some of the same general skills that workers possess, but society blatantly disregards their competencies. Rose uses his mother’s waitressing jobs as an example, “she’d watch the room and note, who needed a refill, whose order was taking too long, who was finishing up” (97). She demonstrates analytical skills and concrete memorization. In a sense, this is the same way a nurse would execute duties, going from patient to patient servicing, cleaning, and disbursing antibiotics in a timely manner. In the work place problems must be confronted despite ramification and social dilemmas. “The big difference between the psychologist’s laboratory and the work place is that in the former the problems are isolated and in the latter they are embedded in the real-time flow of work with all its messiness and social complexity” (Rose 101). Problem solving in incoherent environments exhibits one’s ability to maintain their logical dominance in convoluted situations. This is a developmental skill trait that must be obtained through alteration and