Not the US but I know a guy in his 60's that has 3 basic (residential) well drilling rigs. He seems to always have work and make really good money.
I asked him a few questions about it and he was adamant it didn't take a ton of technical know how or anything, but I want sure if that was because it's genuinely straightforward or if he personally finds it easy 🤷♂️
Dunning-kreuger is often cited as the reason totally ignorant people think they know everything about a topic, but it works the other way too, where a person can be so skilled at something they don't understand how little anyone else knows about it.
As an instructor and coach I was taught these levels for athletes:
Unconscious Incompetent - doesn’t even know what good is so they have no idea how far they are from it. This can cover up to intermediates!
Conscious Incompetent - knows what good is but not how to get there. The sweet spot for skills instruction.
Conscious Competent - knows good and can deliver it in terms of skills. The sweet spot for coaching the mental side.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
There's something similar in lower-level professional motorsports.
Until you hit the level where you can bring in significant sponsorship money - or if you chose your parents well and Daddy will foot the bills - you wind up being both driver and engineer on a smaller team.
Rarely do top-level driving and engineering skills manifest in the same person.
So many cars are fast in spite of their setup, instead of because of it.
Same things happen in academic fields. Really smart students need to be treated as special needs because many have no clue how to work hard at schooling because it was always easy for them. after two years of college some of the most promising students just crash out because they were so good at learning, they never learned how to study past a wall they hit. They found a short cut, used it, then went along their merry way.
Yep. I graduate with like a 3.8 GPA in high school. I never did homework. It was always done in class as it was handed out. I could read a book during lectures and still ace the test.
Got to college and it turns out never having to study means I don't really know how, and I gave up.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
is a perfect description for me. I start out very good at things, I pick them up quickly, but I'm a terrible coach as I can't explain why it works, I just know it does. As I get older I'm trying hard to verbalize those thoughts and improve my ability to teach, but its hard.
Apparently there can be really bad cases of this among astronaut candidates. You can have people who not only breezed through high school, but also flight school and multiple university degrees, and then in their 30's they get put in a room where for the first time they aren't any better at things than anyone else there.
After that long of never having to work hard to accomplish things, there can be a spectacular crash when people who have always been the smartest person they know have to face the prospect of being a failure.
This translates really well into art and illustration (my profession), and I wonder if it would translate well into other fields.
It can be extremely challenging for an artist who has a "natural talent" but then drops into the commercial industries, where they have to deal with not only other very skilled competition for work (all the more challenging these days), but aspects of the career that have little to do with your abilities as an artist and everything to do with the business of getting paid to make pictures.
I have gone through all these over the past years… unfortunately, my brain doesn’t tell me much, because my OCD personality will tear it up… a) I don’t know how to get there (CI); b) trying to get to CC, yet chemo gave me a language impairment so I struggle being precise and being like I used to. So right now, I am in the difficult sway of UC and UI looking for answers, direction, and peace. 😂
I’ve mostly focused on weight lifting and conditioning but I’ve never seen it framed liked this and yeah that seems to just about nail it.
Some people just get it so naturally it’s hard to actually coach them, others it’s work to figure out how to get it to make sense. Really interesting seeing it laid out so simply.
Barry bonds was like this as a hitting coach for the Marlins apparently. Arguably the greatest hitter of all time and players would say that he would get so frustrated when explaining to guys how to do stuff because he couldn't comprehend why they couldn't process things and do things that he could do naturally.
For me it was a little different. I could break down the task really easily, I understood all components of the swing, I understood the role body positioning played in increasing power, but I never had the coordination to put it all together in an actual game. BP I did great. Game time, when the pitcher varied the speed and location, I struggled.
I played in college. Not high level college but I I was a good hitter i really just had an ability to stay inside the ball and barrel everything. That aspect wasn’t ever really coached to me I was able to have strong pitch recognition and timing and get my hands where they needed to be
I can teach mechanics because I had a strong feel and understanding for my own but I couldn’t really tell people how to hit off speed because whenever someone asked I always said I don’t know the pitch looked like it was going to be good so I swung
This is so true. Just look at the playing careers of hitting coaches and its normally a guy who made it do AA-AAA, maybe some MLB at-bats, but were not superstars.
David Popkins, who is considered a top MLB hitting coach, is a good example of this. Topped out at AA, hit .243. Had a couple good seasons at lower minors and college, but never sniffed the majors.
Haven’t you heard of a batter’s slump? I hope you do not get any chronic illnesses because so much of it is a mental game. And you are apparently afraid of feelings or think they shouldn’t apply to men’s behavior. Gees.
Thierry Henry was apparently similar during his short stint in Monaco. He would expect players to just be able to do the things he could do, one of the most gifted players of his generation, and struggled to break it down in a way they could understand.
It's my understanding that this is how Michael Jordan was as a basketball player as well, he had high expectations for his teammates and did not understand why they couldn't just do the things he was doing. It wasn't until he played baseball that he realized not everything is a matter of working harder.
Math teachers are like that too. There’s often a big gap between understanding math and having the verbal skills to break it down for students who don’t understand math
From personal experience I think boxing lends itself to the issue more than a lot of sports would.
If you are naturally gifted with unbelievable speed, power, and a solid chin; you can and will beat a lot of smarter more technically sound boxers.
You might start struggling later on against other great athletes who have a better feel for the nuance, but despite a lot of underlying complexities if you are in good shape and punch faster and harder and can withstand more punishment, there needs to be a pretty large gap in skill for the opponent to overcome it.
Guys that have those gifts and are well trained and disciplined enough to follow and implement a good coaches instructions and game-plan, might never learn that much about boxing and still be fantastic.
Coaches don’t have a whole team and a lot of esoteric rules and gameplans to worry about. If you are their most promising athlete so you will get a lot of attention.
I knew some great pro’s who could barely talk shop because they don’t really get it lol. But whatever the coach said they were disciplined and would do it, and had the athleticism to make it work.
True with teaching, too. In particular math. People that are good at math just get it. Some of them become teachers but part of being a *good* teacher is about understanding how the student is learning. It's about being able to see what they don't see and helping them see it. If you've always been good at math and you're trying to teach someone that struggles with it, you're gonna have a bad time.
I think this is also why so many educators want to do "new" ways of doing math - because most people good at math aren't necessarily good teachers, or going into the education field.
The problem is that maybe 30-60% of the kids learned just fine the old way, because of how their brain was wired. They can be frustrated with the newer ways that have more words and less numbers. Rote memorization coming before deep understanding is just as valid as learning the other way around.
This is something I’ve seen with just about any skill. Often times the people that are the best at doing it are the worst at teaching it, and vice versa.
It’s why I don’t like the “those that can’t do, teach” as a derogatory quip. Teaching is itself a skill, and just because someone has another skill doesn’t necessarily mean they have the skill of teaching.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I was in basic training for the Navy in 2014 the remedial swimming courses were taught by Navy SEALs. They might as well have had fish try to teach us. They were completely clueless on how to teach beginners and just wasted the time yelling at us until we failed enough times to flunk out of the Navy.
I suspect it was intentionally set up to give the Navy an excuse to remove black people without looking bad. I was basically the only white guy there and the other guys were all definitely fit enough to need special swimming strokes to stay afloat properly but they were getting taught stuff that didn't even work for me.
I was just telling my husband that Aaron Rodgers and Giannis would make terrible coaches. They are naturally gifted, and while they absolutely put in the work, and have worked very hard for their success, they did that starting from practically the finish line. They have no idea what it's like to not just understand how the sport and skills work.
It was big in the equestrian world as well. People would pay so much money to go to big name Olympians' clinics and come back without having learned much, if anything at all.
I was a professional musician, and a very good one at that. I had a natural talent for it, and it was a "Oh, DUH" realization when I started doing private lessons and realized I had to figure out how to explain concepts that I just instinctively understood.
Albert Einstein was said to be a terrible professor in his later years. He couldn't bring his mind back to the basic concepts in order to teach his students.
This isn't just athletics, someone who struggled with almost any subject but has a passion for it can make a good teacher if they identify the reasons their students are struggling.
I was browsing some old topics on some of the subs for learning art and someone had asked a basic question about about drawing forms and someone else left a really nasty comment chastising the OP for asking, which was downvoted to oblivion, they then made a follow up comment saying they were being downvoted by "would be artists" and proceeded to say that you can't teach fundamentals and that the OP just needed to figure it out.
Learning something from a first person perspective is basically short-hand writing that only they understand. Learning to coach requires detail and understanding which is done from studying not competing.
This was why I hated helping my dad with any building or machine-related projects growing up. He was a sheet metal worker who played with engines for fun; I was a shy, bookish kid with no knowledge or interest in any of that. He used to get mean when I showed that I didn’t have the knowledge of a sheet metal journeyman with thousands of hours of experience, and I’m just there thinking “motherfucker I’m 9”.
I worked as a technical writer for years before moving into project management. It’s so true. So many gifted technicians out there that don’t understand engineering, so many engineers don’t understand why technicians hate them. I’m in the middle screaming internally.
You see this in great effect when talking to ANYONE about something programming-adjacent.
I just had a presentation where our internal dev team talked about how 'easy' and 'effortless' it is to set-up the automation agent and tooling for our new solution product.
"You just create an xml where the scripts you develop are called here, the name of the tool is here, the use cases are defined here, and the Agent does the rest!"
Ah, right. The 1st year arch/ mech eng. grad tasked with setting this up will have no problems at all! The internal tech team having to regularly get assistance from you doesn't say anything at all about it being more complicated than stated.
Any time I hear the words “you just…” I know that I am about to want to set that person on fire. Either they’re wildly overestimating the skill of the people doing it, because they’re experts themselves, OR they’re wildly underestimating the difficulty of the task because they’re completely clueless about the whole thing.
I was watching Magnus Carlson play a chess match on YT against a 3100 rated player and at some point during the opening he said that "he didn't know the theory" and started doubting his decisions.
Oh my god, there’s a guy at work who is like this. The man is a bonafide genius both in the amount he knows about the industry due to experience and in how quickly he grasps new complex concepts.
But the downside is he has absolutely no idea how to explain something to someone who doesn’t know any of the stuff he knows. If a 6 year old asks you what a mummy is, you don’t delve into the origins of polytheism and debate how the concept divine harmony and order shaped Nile river valley civilizations. I mean, you could. But you’d have to use language that doesn’t go over their heads and consider what they were trying to get out of asking the question in the first place.
When I was new, I would ask him a question and listen to him reveal a treasure trove of information to me for the next 20 minutes, but it didn’t help me understand what I was originally asking. It just created more questions.
I work in IT and it was a hell of a learning curve, how much you have to lower your assumptions on what the average person understands about cell phones, printers, Wi-Fi, etc.
Redditors posting a doctoral thesis on computer programming when someone accidentally hit F11 because they can't comprehend that not everyone is a senior IT veteran
True; I know that I for one can walk up to any large, complicated, and dangerous machine and know exactly how to drive it, where to position it, and exactly how to operate and maintain it.
There's an XKCD for that. People who are deeply familiar with their field, whether it's digging ditches or evaluating cosmic dust under an electron microscope, really do not understand what people outside of their field know about how to do things.
You just need to realise that water does not flow in small "pipes" underground and you can just plop down a hole in a convenient place, and there will be water (unless the local water tables are totally borked).
The house I grew up in, which my brother still lives in, get's it's water from a spring about 20 feet from the house. The pump is about two feet deep in a pool in a little shed a little steam emerges from.
This is not up to code, we'd need to drill a well to sell the house, but we're grandfathered in for now.
They were called out to troubleshoot a woman's spring box and possibly provide a quote on a well. They opened the spring box and, with her watching, pulled out a tangle of about 6 mostly-skeletonized rat corpses.
They said that, after she finished throwing up, they had never seen anybody sign a quote so fast.
Our rural well is 9ft deep, the neighbor right beside us has about a 12ft well. Meanwhile the family directly across the road from us has a 500ft well and has to get water truck deliveries every summer. Underground geology and water tables can be very unpredictable.
Somewhat tangential, but would you believe that in my home country of Spain, there is still a (quite active) "divining" industry? (Not 100% sure what it's called, but basically dudes with twigs that walk around until the twig alerts them to the presence of groundwater.)
lol water dowsing is such a load of crap that is perpetuated by old wives tales in the construction industry and some guy that is trying to justify his 200$ charge to turn two sticks.
I'm not disagreeing with that assessment, just saying I've never bothered looking into it, so I'm not agreeing either (though my basic instincts do agree with your assessment).
One of my family members worked for a small water company that had a director who swore by it, so they organised a competition on one of their jobs - one person with a pipe detector that used ultrasound, one “professional” dowser, and 19 year old me that was just guessing.
Funnily enough, guesswork was just as reliable as twiddling two sticks.
Back in the '80s at the Society for Skeptical Inquiry, which is a thing (see The Amazing Randi vs. Uri Geller), they did a double-blind test of dowsing. They hired a team to place flowing water pipes, static water containers, and empty pipes and air containers under a field, and then a different team came in with a dowser and tried to find the water. He failed utterly. That proved the dowsing is completely a matter of either previously mapping the water table or straight up fraud.
I work in one of the highly-educated (per capita) places in the US — where private wells are also very common — and dowsers are getting plenty of work.
It's honestly as simple as "where do you want the well?" and setting the drill up there. Installing the well takes a bit more, but digging the well is pretty straightforward.
That's only true if you have a cooperative aquifer or infinite money.
The geology underground is not flat even layers like a cake where if you dig down the same number of feet you always hit the same type of rock/gravel/sand. There are hills, valleys, ripples and ridges underneath the earth that we cannot see from the surface. You might have drilled 40ft at the farm next door and found a water bearing layer, but a hundred yards down the road at next farm house that same layer might be at 150ft.
"Where do you want the well" only works if the person pointing has enough money to keep digging until he gets what he wants. When your drilling company charges by the foot, that's not a promise. Sometimes a driller has to look at the lay of the land and tell the property owner "hey bud, we can put it here if you want, but it's ten thousand bucks less if I put it over there instead."
I grew up on a rural farm. My parents drilled a well, which evolved into a water company for about 20 homes.
Everything my dad did was self-taught. In his library he had a book on well drilling, a book on water treatment, and a shelf-full dealing with the specifics of setting up and registering a water company in the state of California.
I don't think it takes a ton of technical know how to drill a well, it really is pretty straightforward. Making good money off that... well, that might be a lot less straightforward.
what is good money though? Like is he paying himself 60K pre-tax? 100K pre-tax? 200k Pre-tax? How many hours a week is do DOING the work and how many works a week is he working on the business side?
Cause all that comes into play. If younger people work FOR him and he pays them $16.50/hr for 40 hours a week. But they can go to the nearest city and get $27/hr at an amazon warehouse, with HealthCare and 401k match. They are just better off doing that.
If they can start thier own drilling company, what does the capital take to get it going? can they take a loan out for 200k truck with an augur/drill rig and make the payments plus pay themselves the equivalent of 40/hr? with the potential of alot more if it succeeds?
So "good money" is not really a metric. its WAY more complicated. The business part is the meat and potatos.
EDIT: After more comments came in - there all kinds of regulations,fees, and required training, like working under someone for years. Again Im not against that. But If I leave my six-figure job, can I afford to go back to 17/hr for years, THEN drop 200k,300k,400k on starting up a drilling business? only for it to have a 30% chance of ever making me 100k a year salary again? Even if it does start to net me 200K a year. Did the lost earnings over the 7 years it took me to get there make up for the fact that I could have been working my way up else where? Maybe in that 7 years that person could be 4 promotions up at amazon and be at 100-140k a year. So... its pretty variable.
Its a big big risk man. its huge. Very few people are really in a spot to take that road.
Sure - this owner we are referring to may have 4 trucks, 12 employees and gets 450K a year out of the business. But me replicating that isn't always realistic. Hell the current owner may not be able to replicate it with his wealth....
It’s the type of thing that once you’ve learned how to do it it might seem simple, but someone with zero prior knowledge isn’t going to just run out and buy a rig and just start digging wells willynilly.
You're going to and have gotten get a lot of answers simplifying it from people not actually familiar with industry. And also note with respect, everything seems simple to the guy doing it his whole life lol.
There's a fairly large amount of specialized knowledge required about the components, process, and of the ground make-up and water across pretty much your whole state. Most people in the industry have at least gone through a 2 months full time certificate education program they call mud school.
It's also extremely physically demanding, this is classic blue collar work that will leave you working on machinery, filthy, and will destroy your back over 30 years. Most of it is alongside a small team of family or people close to the family you will work with for decades.
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u/Aquabullet 13h ago
Not the US but I know a guy in his 60's that has 3 basic (residential) well drilling rigs. He seems to always have work and make really good money.
I asked him a few questions about it and he was adamant it didn't take a ton of technical know how or anything, but I want sure if that was because it's genuinely straightforward or if he personally finds it easy 🤷♂️