My daughter asked me to kill the bug in her room—Super Dad to the rescue.  That got me wondering.  Do most men think we excel at most things?  As I pondered weak and weary, I started to formulate this list.  I ask the men as they read through the list to score themselves on a ranking of one to five, with five being the highest, how they view their abilities in each area.  Ladies, feel free to play along on behalf of someone you know.

1. Sunday Sports
2. Getting a taxi
3. Navigating
4. Mowing the lawn
5. Killing spiders
6. Drawing a straight line by hand
7. Multitasking
8. Parallel parking
9. Anything to do with fire
10. Opening jars
11. Sharpening a pencil with a knife
12. Tipping
13. Driving
14. Cooking on the grill

Maybe this comes from that hunter-gatherer thing.  Total your score silently in your head—you can do this because you also happen to think you excel in math.  My guess is that 98% of us scored somewhere between 56 and 70, the majority leaning towards the higher end of the range.  Granted, these are simply opinions, nothing any of us has to prove.

However, when pushed most of us will back down on one or two things if we had to prove our prowess.  Take juggling for example.  Even an egoist will be reticent to rate himself an excellent juggler.

Here we go.  Why then when we (ladies, this also includes you) are faced with something challenging at work we do our best to convince ourselves and others that the task can be no more difficult than opening a jar, asking directions, or asking for help?  We prefer to fly solo, believing we will somehow figure it out on the way.

I cannot recall the last time I heard someone facing a big ugly IT project state anything like:

• You’ve got the wrong person
• I have no idea how to do this
• There is no way this is going to work

EHR, reform, Meaningful Use, interoperability.  These are big ugly projects.  Some are projects for which only a scarce few have real subject matter expertise—a handful of which truly ‘get it’, and others for which no one is credentialed.  Yet when we hear the proclamations about how standards are coming, how the N-HIN will work, and how reform will impact healthcare over the next five years, they seem to be stated with such assurance so as to infer that these industry-altering programs are no more difficult than parallel parking.

Remember the game Trivial Pursuit?  There was an inverse relationship between how certain I was of an answer and the certainty with which I asserted it.  If I said the answer quickly and with enough confidence I could occasionally convince the other players not to even check the answer on the back of the card.  For example, if the question is “name the bird who lays its eggs in the nest of another bird,’ and you belt out, ‘racket-tailed coquette,’ you just may pull it off.

It’s just an observation on my part, but why is it that when the nice people in charge tell us that they know what they are doing to me it sounds like they are yelling, racket-tailed coquette.’