# You Can't Do That

By [Corporate Heretic](https://paragraph.com/@corporate-heretic) · 2025-05-24

career, skills, titles

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![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/e0c001576f94ee04939fa64afc892078.png)

Introducing the latest career board game nobody asked for:  
  
You Can’t Do That™  
The game of limiting others based on your own narrow view of the world!  
  
This one’s personal.  
  
I’ve done engineering, trades, arts, marketing, manual labor, and served frozen yogurt in the early ’90s—shout out to Humphrey Yogart and the Chill Out Café.  
  
I’ve programmed machines, calibrated optical columns, created VR experiences, launched campaigns, framed houses, and I even made an animated web series.  
  
I’m proud of what I’ve done. But a lot of people don’t understand what it means to have a diverse skill set. So I hear things like:  
  
“How would you even describe your career path?” (Valley girl accent)  
  
“How are you an engineer if you didn’t go to school for engineering?” (Usually said sarcastically by engineering managers)  
  
“Your degree is in marketing—where is all this technical experience coming from?” (Heard often from recruiters and in interviews)  
  
“Marketing people and engineering people are two totally different types of people.” (Almost always from amateur psychologists—so many of those)  
  
Says who?  
  
Because I don’t see any of it that way.  
I don’t think people are tired stereotypes.  
  
In my experience, there’s crossover in everything—skills, concepts, methodologies, beliefs. No matter where you apply them, they share common ground. I’ve deepened my understanding of fine art by doing engineering projects—and vice versa.  
  
Polymaths—like me—know this.  
We just have trouble making other people understand.  
And—unpopular opinion incoming—I think assuming things about people based on their education, title, or résumé is a form of bigotry.  
(Go ahead and look up the definition of bigotry before screaming at me.)  
  
If we want to solve the increasing challenges of the modern world, we need to snap out of our professional dogma and realize:  
  
We’re not a LinkedIn headline.  
We’re not a degree.  
We’re not a title.  
We’re messy, curious, inconsistent, ever-evolving beings.  
  
We can build bridges and write poems.  
Fix plumbing and run companies.  
Learn things just because we want to.  
  
We put people in boxes and then ask them to think outside of them. That seems insane to me.  
  
So stop asking, “What do you do?”  
Start asking, “What can you do?”  
  
Or better yet:  
  
“What do you want to do?”  
  
Because I’m not playing the “You Can’t Do That” game anymore.  
And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

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*Originally published on [Corporate Heretic](https://paragraph.com/@corporate-heretic/you-cant-do-that)*