Something I learned managing people over the years is that only about one out of fifty people don’t need pretty explicit directions to complete nearly any given task. The other forty-nine will need it step by step or they simply can’t do it. This isn’t ideal for a lot of the business world (particularly IT) because of how often you are doing things that have not been done exactly that way before.

If you’re the 1/50 who can just get things done without detailed and constant instruction, you’re immensely valuable. Working with people like that is so much easier and the organization is so much better off. The intern I worked with a while ago was like that, which was probably one of the reasons we got along so well.

Perhaps this is trainable. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all, though. Quite the opposite. I’d love to be proved wrong, however.