When you say 'some of these jobs', are you talking about, say, manual labour at oil wells? I have a hard time thinking of any trade that an average person would

When you say 'some of these jobs', are you talking about, say, manual labour at oil wells? I have a hard time thinking of any trade that an average person would struggle to thrive in if they were willing to do the work. A few exist, but to use them as a reason to avoid trade work is disingenuous. In fact, even working as a labourer at an oil well is easy enough that one of my friends who normally works as a graphic designer did it for a few months while traveling in Canada. The hardest part of his experience was that he didn't see his girlfriend very much. I spent the first 23 years of my life as a weak, desk-dwelling geek. I never thought I could work a trade. I never even thought a trade was worthwhile work. Now I'm an industrial electrician with a great job and a fulfilling life. The work is 'hard', sure. There's a lot of manual labour and the sites we work at (abattoirs, waste water treatment plants, chemical mixing plants etc) are all unpleasant for one reason or another, but the day you get over yourself and get properly stuck into the job you realise that it's actually worthwhile work and it isn't even very hard. Even for somebody who spent the majority of their life training to work at a desk. Comparing trade work to being an elite athlete is absurd, too. Statistically speaking, there's no reason what so ever that would prevent you from doing well in a trade. Quite the opposite. Most trades just require somebody willing to do the work. They don't require unusually high IQ (although high creativity can be great for problem solving), they don't require unusually high fitness, they just require somebody to do the work. If you want to do well, do lots of work. It's pretty simple. Most people just aren't willing to do it because they don't think trade work is respectable. Oh, and it's 'hard'.