Jim Lopardo tells this story:
I was a percussion major when I was in college, and during a rehearsal of the student orchestra, my section kept making mistakes.
"When you’re too dumb to play anything," the professor conducting us sneered, "they give you a couple of sticks, put you in the back and call you a percussionist."
A friend next to me whispered, "And if you’re too dumb to hang on to both sticks, they put you in the front and call you a conductor."
[Source: Reader’s Digest. From a sermon by Ed Vasicek, "Hitting Bottom" 2/16/2009)