You can do anything you want, even do it well if you work hard at it. That doesn’t mean you’ll be financially successful at it. One thing you discover in adulthood is there’s an alchemy to success - it’s not just you, it’s everything around you, especially in areas where the talent pool is large like music, theater, dance or sports. Lots of people engage in those careers without being successful, and don’t mind it.
One of my classmates was (and remains) completely tone deaf. He’s a professional percussionist :D. He was the first person surprised when he was given the triangle for a school show and realized that he could hear differences there, begged our music teacher to let him drop the usual work and focus on learning the percussion instruments we had available. Only slightly less surprised than he was, she tentatively agreed and ended up letting him do his thing for the rest of the year.
That said, I do believe that it’s important to be realistic. If Luismi had the same sense of rhythm as, say, my Dad, he would have been as able to play that triangle as he is of playing the flute. Being able to recognize something you happen to both be good at and like is great (and what Luismi did); insisting that you must be allowed to become a professional musician despite not being able to play two rocks is not.
I think it used to be, generations ago, that kids were more likely to grow up believing (or being told) that their life was mapped out for them. If you were a girl, you were going to get married and stay home to raise a family. If you were a boy, you were going to grow up to do what your father did. If you were lower middle class, you would stay lower middle class. Or maybe, if your parents were ambitious, they had a better, more prestigious career path picked out for you.
Hearing “you can be anything you want to be” might have been a useful corrective or challenge to such a mindset.
When someone is under say, 15 years old, their possible futures are unlimited. After that point, there are some things that just aren’t going to happen given their talent level, intelligence, size, looks, etc. and they have to start being more realistic.
Luck and risk taking are related but are really not the same thing. Luck is having a risk work out well for you. It might not. It’s a risk.
You can take lots of risks and have them work out poorly. That’s lots of risk and bad luck. You can take few risks, but still have one of them pay off very well. That’s little risk and would be good luck.
Taking more risks increases the impact that luck will have on your life.
The higher up into the rarefied echelons of excellence you go in whatever field, the more that luck plays a factor. Because by the time you get to the top 1%, those people are all hard workers and at least reasonable risk-takers. When you get to the top 0.001%, everyone there has worked hard, taken risks, and been lucky.
Lots of people write books and try to get them published. Plenty of hardworking writers make a living at it. Only the really lucky write bestsellers.
Lots of people start businesses. Plenty of hardworking businesspeople have successful businesses. Only the really lucky run $billion companies.
Or, to bring it back to the story that inspired the OP: Lots of people can practice and become very good at basketball. Only the lucky ones are born with the genes to be 6’7" tall (average height of an NBA player). Good genes obviously have nothing to do with risk taking. Just luck.
Of course, there are a few below-average-height people who play professional basketball, so to some extent, hard work can overcome physical limitations. But there are no people with muscular dystrophy playing in the NBA, so sometimes it can’t.
In a lot of cases, the pathway forward will have a natural weeding out process. Sports, for example, will make it clear early on that you’re not on the path to success. Teams won’t play you if you can’t help them win. The practices can be very tough. But other pathways have entire industries built around enabling your dreams no matter if they are achievable or not. Things like singing, dancing, and acting are all subjective. Even the successful people had failure after failure before they became famous. The industry keeps encouraging you to take more lessons, get more headshots, go to more auditions, and never give up. The industry wants your money, so they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.
There was a documentary I saw a while back about child actors. There’s a apartment complex out in Los Angeles where lots of hopeful kid actors stay. They try out for anything they can. If they get any minor role, the parents get even more involved. The agents have seminars where they say “Never work for free”. Photographers say a new set of headshots is the key to success. It seems like a huge scam to get as much money from the parents as possible. And the kids keep getting non-stop encouragement to keep trying.
With things like acting that can be exploited, I think it can be harmful to encourage kids to blindly follow their dream without regard to their ability. But with sports, I think it’s okay. There are a lot of benefits to being involved in sports even if you never end up pro. Even if you’re not good at sports, being in sports means you’ll get better. If you tell a kid he’ll never be a pro basketball player and he then quits, he’s denied all the enjoyment he would have gotten from playing.
Could you PM me a link to that documentary? We went undercover to a ripoff place in NJ which told parents their babies could be stars - all you need is to get expensive headshots. IN fact babies don’t use headshots - they change too fast and the only thing casting directors care about is separation anxiety.
However acting talent is not as subjective as you’d think. Agents can tell, and we got so that we could tell also. Being famous is a matter of luck, getting jobs is somewhat a matter of luck, but being signed by a reputable agent isn’t.
I think it was called “The Hollywood Complex” from PBS America.
Then how come every successful person I have ever heard always says, “I am the luckiest guy on the planet” ?
What do you call a risk? A long shot, or a sure thing? Lots of people work their tails off and fail at long shots.
I suspect there are more kids suffering from the low expectations of the adults around them than there are kids bamboozled by unrealistically high expectations.
The problem with “You can be whatever you want” is completely self-limiting. Practically all young adults come to realize all on their own that you can’t always get what you want…but if you try sometimes, you just might get what you need. Sure, they can learn this when they are a kid, but why not allow a child to indulge in fantasy? How many of us have exceeded the expectations of parents and various teachers?
That said, I think serious come-to-Jesus discussions are necessary when it comes to college expenses. I don’t think it makes much sense to take out six-figure debt to make a non-physician or non-Big Law dream come true. But this applies no matter how talented a dreamer is. So somewhere down the line, I think a teen needs to hear “You can try to be anything you want, but you need to be prepared for the costs. Don’t be a fool.”
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Trying and failing is not the only possible result where failing from trying is.
People are not good athletes, musicians or scientists because of natural talents but due to practice. If one is not given the motivation to practice and shoot for the top and the impossible they will never rise above mediocrity.
We learn from our failures and IMHO there is no benefit from discouraging the attempt. The failure to reach the top is not a complete failure and is more than likely above where you would get by just going along for the ride.
Those not gifted with innate talent cannot rise above mediocrity through sheer practice. It takes both.
And there’s your answer, DavidwithanR. Those who have made it and refuse to believe that anything but their own hard work is 100% responsible. (As a recent federal office nominee born to wealth and privilege said, he succeeded “on his own.”) It also makes it easy for them to flatly state that anyone who hasn’t succeeded didn’t try hard enough and is therefore unentitled to social programs that level the playing field a bit.
While raw “talent” is needed excessive attention is placed on raw talent. “natural talent" does nothing if it isn’t developed and nurtured. If you lack the motivation or access to effective training you won’t rise to the top. I get that training is boring and that you may not be one of the rare individuals that comes through every century or so but that is not who you are competing against for the most part.
Had Newton not learned to self educate as a child he would have probably just returned to work on the farm once the outbreak of the plague shut down the University as an example. Had his father not died before his birth and his mother not left when she re-married he may never have hung out with a pharmacist to learn those skills.
The point is that if you don’t at least try you have already failed.
Exactly as I advocated.
I cite the example given in the OP. Do you think parents (who, until their kids reach high school, been praising accomplishments more than effort) hold more sway than the media? Do you think coaches give the kids they’re trying to motivate a cold shower on their future aspirations?)
Unscrupulous institutions, by your own admission, are a very real impediment to success - even for the talented and hard-working. It’s incumbent upon parents to point this out.
I use “snowflake” here in the same way it’s usually used: to refer to kids who grew up
with everyone getting participation trophies. The ones who have done the hard work they’ve been told to do will see this as the first step towards a higher goal if they just work harder.
Everyone is this thread agrees that raw talent isn’t enough. I’ve read (but sorry, can’t find a cite) that parents often say their child who is at the highest level of their sport wasn’t the most talented, but the most determined and hard-working. That doesn’t negate the presence of natural talent.
Newton’s youth is the perfect example of the role of good luck.
Trying is vital, maybe the most vital, element. But it’s much more realistic to stress the value of the effort whatever the result. And maintaining a balanced life - just to turn the most dominant example here on its head, don’t dedicate yourself to working for business or academic success at the expense of forming habits of sport and exercise that can have their own benefits and life lessons.
The success that many people aspire to is one out of a million success. To be an Olympic gold medalist, for instance, you need to be gifted with Top-1% genetics to start out with. Then you need to be in the Top-1% most hardworking out of that subset. Then you need to be in the lucky Top-1% in that subset that gets a big break or notice from a coach or team or federation or some other luck befall you in a few races or games.
0.01 x 0.01 x 0.01 = one out of a million odds.
I have to respectfully disagree–if anything, parents have too high expectations (mostly misplaced) for their children; note the number of parents who sue schools because kid didn’t make varsity team (as in Missouri recently), remove varsity sports because their kids feel bad for not making team, or having 10 valedictorians. This new concept that kids should not have to feel 'bad" for failure, whether tests, grades, or athletic, is leading to an entitlement mentality, hence “attendance” trophies. Parents are not doing their children any useful traits when they enter work force where you don’t get rewarded for merely showing up, or trying hard (which is not the same as actually doing job well)
unfortunately parents are not 'realistic" when it comes to children’s abilities, hence lawsuits against schools, coaches
I was reminded of this thread when I read this BBC article about chef Claire Smythe.