Validity of "You can be anything you want to be" as advice

Great Debates
61

Good god, I have an acknowledged talent for writing, but do I consider myself a failure because I’m not as famous as Stephen King? Of course not. I write to please myself, and to bask in compliments, and requests for copies when I choose to read what I write to others. After all, they can’t all be lying to spare my feelings.

If I were to put in the unrelenting effort needed to become even published, never mind famous for my work, I would soon come to hate the part of myself I loved the most. No fame is worth that.

Does Hemingway still revel in his notorioty? No, because he’s dead now. And so will I be someday.
And my lack of fame will trouble me then even less than it does now.

Sure, I’ll be forgotten. But so will Hemingway someday, if millennials are any sign to go by.

62

I agree that in a lot of cases, it’s the parents that are the cause of the unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they are living out their fantasies of of success through their kids, and doing so in an unhealthy manner. They don’t seem to be able to see that their kid isn’t a pro singer or athlete. To the parent, their kid truly is the best in the world, and they just need to keep encouraging them to reach for the stars (e.g. stage moms).

63

Unless you have a physical deformity or a brain injury keeping you from pressing the keys or reading music, this is simply not true. There have been many studies that have tried to disentangle ‘talent’ from ‘hard work’, and they universally find that almost all ‘talent’ is simply hard work. Wayne Gretzky was a ‘talented’ hockey player - who was playing hours a day on his home rink since he was a small child. The Beatles were ‘talented’, but had been playing together in bars in Hamburg for years on a gruelling 8 hour a night schedule, and had thousands of hours of experience as a band before hitting it big.

I read a study a few months ago that compared entrants to a music academy - I want to say Berklee but I’m not sure and I can’t find the study now. But they rated the students coming in to find the ‘prodigy’ students - the ones that were supposed to be extremely, innately talented. They then measured them against their peers in the class to see how much farther ahead they were. Then when they graduated they were measured again - and what was found was that the ‘prodigy’ students did NOT advance faster than the others, and in fact the students who advanced the most were simply the ones who did the most work.

When I was young I used to tell myself that I was very uncoordinated. Always tripping over things, never as good at physical activities as the jocks, etc. In fact, what was actually going on is that I was a bookworm and I was always thinking about stuff, so I was just careless and didn’t pay attention to my surroundings. I wasn’t good at sports because I didn’t play sports for fun like the other kids, so I didn’t have as much practice at it. In my mind, that translated into ‘lack of physical coordination and talent at physical things.’

After high school I was about 30 lbs overweight, and still telling myself that I was a physical schlub. So, I enrolled in a martial arts class. And excelled at it. I discovered that I was just as coordinated as anyone else, and I worked my ass off and very rapidly developed physical awareness, balance, and all the other things necessary.

Talent is nothing more than evidence of accumulated practice. Now, one thing is true - people will advance faster if they know HOW to practice, and that too is a skill that needs to be learned. When I was teaching karate to kids, I could predict almost instantly which ones would advance at the fastest rate - they were the ones actually listening, trying to apply what they were taught, were willing to ask questions, etc. Just showing up and going through the motions will not get you there.

If you take piano lessons with the attitude that it’s really hard and you aren’t cut out for it or lack the innate talent to do it, you’ll practice half-heartedly and give it up before you reach the point where you could see the improvement. That will reinforce your belief that you just don’t have ‘talent’ for it. If, on the other hand, you listen to what your teacher is telling you and you focus hard on where you are going wrong and you practice an hour a day between lessons, I guarantee that you WILL get better, and it will not take long before you find yourself able to play things you never dreamed you’d be able to play.

I know this is true because I started piano lessons when I was in my early 40’s, expecting to fail at it (I took the lessons because my kid was taking violin lessons at the same place, so I decided that instead of just wasting my time sitting and waiting, I might as well learn something). I didn’t continue with it after my son left there for a private teacher, but I could see that if I had just continued I could have been a perfectly adequate recreational piano player in a couple of years. And I would never have believed that going in.

Bad examples. The reason you have a good head for trivia is no doubt because you’ve been reading books like crazy since you were a small child. Am I right? I’ve got a good head for trivia too, but like I said I was a bookworm. You may have enjoyed the reading and not thought of it as ‘work’, but it was certainly good practice for Jeopardy. Feynman was a ‘natural’ at math because he was doing math puzzles when he was very small, and by the time he was fifteen had already spent more time thinking about mathematical problems than most people do in their entire lives.

Speaking of that… My kid was told by his grade 10 teacher that he had no aptitude for math and should give up on science in university and go into the liberal arts where his lack of math skill wouldn’t hurt him. Instead of listening to the old bat, he knuckled down and studied, and I tutored him extensively. Last week he started his third year in honors mathematics at university, with a minor in computer science. He does mathematical proofs for fun now, and has so far a straight ‘A’ average in all his math classes. I’ll bet the other kids who don’t work as hard think he’s just ‘lucky’ to have that ‘innate talent’ for math.

64

How about we make the goals a little more realistic? How about telling poor kids that they CAN rise above their poverty if they put in the work to do it? They don’t have to make it to the 1%, but they can certainly make it out of poverty and into the middle class or even the upper middle class.

Since this is Great Debates, Here’s a link to the Brookings Institution Data on Intergeneration Mobility

It shows that of the famiies in the bottom economic quintile today:

6% will see an adult child reach the top income quintile
11% will see an adult child reach the second highest quintile
19% will see an adult child reach the third highest quintile
23% will see an adult child reach the fourth highest quintile
42% will not see an adult child leave the quintile they were born into

That means that fully 58% of the children born to the lowest income quintile in America will move out of it as adults, and 36% of them will make it into the upper middle class or higher.

You still want to tell poor children that hard work is irrelevant, because there’s no escaping their class other than luck?

65

Or perhaps simply be driven to a less popular game, which do exist.

But I question why many people think that being unsuccessful at accomplishing the impossible is a failure in their mind.

If a child is so risk averse as to not try they will never rise to their potential. The general assumption that failing to reach a lofty goal is damaging or even a negative is a problem for me. As we learn more from our mistakes than our mentors it seems silly to not allow or encourage this.

Teaching children to be ashamed of their limitations or that failure is shameful seems far more limiting and destructive to an individual.

If you fail to make the cut as an astronaut you are still a highly educated professional, if you fail to make an Olympics team you still have learned how to stick with a goal despite the pain or challenges.

Premature coddling children from the truth that they will learn seems to be far more destructive in my mind.

66

False modesty. Lots of people would rather hear that than, “I’m rich because I worked harder than you did.”

Risk management is the key. And also preparation to be able to take advantage of ‘luck’ when it arrives.

Everyone has good luck and bad luck. For sure, some people have bad luck that destroys them. A friend of mine was hit by a car while sitting at a light on a motorcycle and killed. That’s bad luck.

But assuming you don’t die, you can adjust to the fact that we all swim in a sea of uncertainty, and good and bad luck comes our way all the time. The successful people have behaviors that allow them to take advantage of good luck and minimize the risk of damage from bad luck.

For example, when I was in college I worked at Radio Shack on weekends. Back then, Radio Shack sold computers, and I was a computer salesman. One day a guy came in who needed help with his Tandy 1000. I went above and beyond, helping him fix the issue, helping him learn how not to have it happen again, etc. A week later, he came back in and offered me a job doing incredibly cool work for more money than I was getting at Radio Shack. It turns out he was the director of an animal behavior program using computers to interface with dolphins, and they had gotten funding for a buying a bunch of computers and programming them and he didn’t know where to start. So he thought of me, and I got the job.

So, was I ‘lucky’? Sure. If I hadn’t been on shift that day, I wouldn’t have gotten the gig. However… If any of the other half-assed salesmen who were just there for commission and didn’t treat customers well or didn’t bother to learn their products had served him, do you think they would have benefited from that ‘luck’? Not a chance. Hard work has a way of making luck work for you. And those other people who had a chance to benefit from ‘luck’ never even knew the opportunity was there and had passed them by. So they might have convinced themselves that nothing ‘lucky’ ever happened to them.

“There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.” - Robert Heinlein

67

So you don’t believe in tone deafness or perfect pitch? My kids took Suzuki violin. I went to a class, where the teacher played notes the kids identified - they were pre-K. I heard no difference for most, though I could distinguish really high from really low. On the other hand my father-in-law had perfect pitch. His parents were not exactly supportive of a music career.
Do you really think we’re all wired the same?

Talk about your selection bias. Steph Curry also practiced a lot. Now, how many kids practiced as much as he did and got nowhere? Now it is true that those who hve practiced for hours and hours and still can’t get it will eventually give up. But how long do you expect people to smash their head against the wall?
Ever heard the Hamburg music? Not all that exciting. Ever hear their first demo, Love of the Loved? Even less exciting. George and Paul were excellent at their instruments, John middling, but they excelled at songwriting, which Hamburg did nothing to advance.
Dylan did not write a lot of songs before he heard Brecht and Weill. He listened to lots of music of all types, like lots of others. Yet within a year he was pouring out classics. That was not from practice.

Irrelevant. No one lme even goes near a music academy. Some prodigies are actually gifted, and some are just advanced, so that others catch up. I went from Dick and Janes to Jules Verne in a month or two in first grade, but that was just advanced. It is not like I read that much better today.

Are any of them going to be able to make a living from it? Could you? I’m sure if I cared about baseball more as a kid I’d have been better at it. But making the major leagues? Or even my high school team? Not going to happen. And I was physically suited for it too.

Can you hear notes? If you can, irrelevant. Now, I have learned a lot about classical music from hearing Greenbergs CDs, but when he gets to demonstrating details about how keys affect attitudes and how Bach did transitions, I hear the theory but I don’t hear the notes. I can get dissonance fine. You are basically telling someone who is colorblind that he can distinguish colors if he just tries harder.

Nope. My wife reads as much as I do, but is not good at trivia. It is not reading, it is memory. I got a Trivial Pursuit answer once from remembering an ad in the NY Times Book Review from at least 15 years before. I’ve read no more papers than my colleagues, but I’m the guy who can remember one from 25 years ago that is relevant to a talk I’m attending. (Speakers hate people like me.)
Isaac Asimov could remember everything. (I knew this before, but I heard it from him directly also.) You can train yourself to remember better, but you can’t train yourself into that kind of ability.

On the other hand I have quite an aptitude for algebra. I got an 800 on the SATs before they published the tests with no sweat. I studied calculus twice as hard as I studied algebra. While I passed the AP test and my college classes with no big problems, I don’t have the same aptitude. I’m very verbal and not at all visual. I suck at mazes but can do really hard cryptic crosswords.
People do get better with practice - but often not to the point of making a good living, or being well known, for it.
Look, my daughter took one third grade low stress everyone gets a chance acting class like zillions of kids. She didn’t get signed because of her class, she got signed because she knew how to present herself. (I did not coach her.)
You are seriously underestimating our diversity.

68

You can do anything you want is a wonderful message for children when they’re young. Why limit their dreams when they’re growing up?
But as the child gets older, part of the job of a parent is teaching the importance of work - success doesn’t just ‘happen’. No tennis player suddenly wakes up and finds themselves in the finals of the US Open.
You can do anything you want, if you work at it.

In addition, part of the job of a parent is teaching the importance of setting challenging but feasible goals.
"I want to ride in the Tour de France’ is not a realistic goal for a 50yr old part-time cyclist with a full-time job.
"I want to ride in L’Étape du Tour and finish in the top 50%’ might be.

I grew up poor. Dirt poor. Like, we couldn’t buy dirt unless it was on sale or something.
I’m now reasonably well off.
My mom always said that success isn’t just goals achieved, it’s obstacles overcome.
She taught me the value of hard work, and the value of challenging, but feasible, short-term goals to work towards.
To this day, I firmly believe that I have the power in me to achieve any reasonably realistic goal I set my mind to, no matter how challenging.

69

One million times this. For many years I thought all the great breaks I had were ‘luck’. Sometimes I say so - but deep down, I know now that it’s false modesty.
Nearly every one of those ‘lucky breaks’ were the end result of working my butt off at something, and ending up surrounding myself with people with the same drive and commitment.
So that when one of those ‘lucky breaks’ arose, I’d be someone that came to mind. ‘Make your own luck’ might be a cliche, but it’s true - you really do make your own luck.

70

So there is a rare trait of absolute pitch, it has disadvantages too. A good example is how annoyed these individuals get when working with historical tunings or doing transpositions.

Absolute pitch is not necessarily or even of high importance even to musicians and go over the comments here and see how few orchestras even use 440hz.

https://www.violinist.com/discussion/archive/11273/

71

I should mention that relative pitch is teachable to most people and often more useful than absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is different, not a super power.

72

In the professional world, agents, managers and casting directors are well aware of this issue, which is why kids go in alone - no parents. They know if the kid is not that interested. Eventually the parent will run out of agents to bug.
Amateur productions may have it tougher.
Most - almost all - of the parents I met at shoots were there as guardians and taxi drivers, with no obnoxious pushing. But their kids did have talent.

73

My father in law was a mildly successful composer and music teacher (his day job) but I don’t think his ability had much of a role in either of those. I brought it up as a talent that did not come from practice.
Perhaps I could be marginally better after tons of practice - but never any good. I’m naturally good at enough things that didn’t need practice that I know the difference.

74

Perhaps we can say hard work is necessary, but not sufficient, for success. The successful musician will put in X hours of practice, but all people who put in X hours of practice won’t become successful musicians.
Let alone geniuses.

75

If practice is consistent, intensely focused and targeting weaknesses that lie at the edge of one’s current abilities. one will build skills but it is not a quantity game. Poor results will come from poor practice practices :wink:

Music is interdisciplinary and not all of it is becoming a perfect human record player. More musical careers end due to boredom then limits of skill. Often misguided rote practice of existing skills or programs which do not encourage the fact that practice will always be hard and provide motivation are the primal cause.

While raw talent is a nice to have, without the proper culture and luck in finding good teaching resources or at least a muse will never take advantage of those “raw talents”.

There is no shame in deciding you have hit limits in your abilities in an area, but it is a shame when those limits are not actual and someone abandons a dream due to poor instruction or a lack of support by people who encourage them to test the boundaries.

76

But most of the successful people I hear talking about luck weren’t born particularly rich. They simply appreciate that a number of factors came together to allow them to reach their full potential.

They had parents who supported their dreams, even if they didn’t really understand them. Lots of parents don’t do this. They discourage dreaming and force their children to be practical-minded.

They had parents who did not burden them with a lot of work. It’s kind of hard to practice hours each day when you’re babysitting younger siblings, caring for sick parents, and working to help put food on the table.

They had teachers and mentors and extended family members who could provide additional support. This community can also mitigate any their parental shortcomings (see “Hillbilly Elegy” for an example)

These successful individuals were blessed with good health and physical ability. It is kind of hard to be a successful athlete when you’re sick all the time. For successful individuals who were sickly or disabled, the people around them still maintained high expectations for them. They weren’t deprived of education and social life. They were encouraged to keep trucking, even if the odds were stacked against them.

The success that people have is a function of the specific time and place they were born into. If Bill Gates had been born out in some rural boondock thousands of miles from the closest computer lab, he would had a different trajectory in life. If Richard Allen had been owned by a less progressive slave owner, he probably would have never learned how to read and write and he likely would have never had the opportunity to purchase his own freedom, and the AME church would have never been founded. If Benjamin Franklin had been born a woman, well, his name would have been Jane Franklin, and she would have lived a life with more struggle and heartache, and no fame.

Exposure is another thing that’s outside of someone’s control. I firmly believe I would have never gone into my field (environmental science) if it hadn’t been for a single internship I had in college. Now, it could be that absent that experience, I would have found another path and gone on to find even greater success. But it’s also possible I would have wound up being yet another biology major working at the Gap. I am not arrogant enough to believe that I was destined for success no matter what.

Successful people who have a modicum of modesty can look back on all the choices they made in life and see all the other choices they could have made, if it hadn’t been for the presence of an external factor outside of their control. That isn’t false modesty at all. It’s just a recognition of reality. And appreciating reality doesn’t require someone to devalue their own effort. I studied hard in school and did make some good choices. But I also know I didn’t pick my parents, I didn’t pick the body I was born into, I didn’t pick my teachers or my classmates, I didn’t pick the experiences I was exposed to. I didn’t even pick my proclivities, interests, and personality. What my experience on this planet has taught me is if we want to produce highly successful people, we have to produce highly nurturing environments. We don’t create highly successful people by yelling “WORK HARDER, DAMMIT!” Successful people don’t need anyone to tell them to practice more because they are motivated enough to do it on their own. But successful people do need space and time to reach their potential. No child creates their own space and time. The conditions around them do that.

77

Trump became the President, so now I tend to err a lot more on the side of “you can do anything” than I did prior to 2016.

PS: I don’t want to turn this into a political discussion, I’m just noting one high-profile improbable dream coming true in recent memory.

78

Given that it’s axiomatic that anyone can sue for anything, I’d be far more interested in how many of these lawsuits are successful before I worry that it’s anything more than a way for rich people to pay for their lawyer’s boat.

79

There is some research to support the idea that success is the result of a combination of talent and hard work. It’s rare to succeed with only one of those. If you are 5’4" you are probably not going to be an NBA center. L.A. is littered with aspiring movie stars who make more waiting on tables than they ever will make acting.

Maria Bamford echoed this in one of her stand-up routines (sorry, no cite, but it’s on one of her published recordings; I’m paraphrasing): People say you just have to work really hard, but in show business there are a lot of people who work really hard and never get anywhere, and there are a lot of successful people who didn’t work hard at all.

But I believe that most people are limited not by their talents but by their vision of what they could accomplish. If nobody ever believed they could be an astronaut, then nobody would ever become an astronaut.

Here is a story of a youth who dreamed of being an astronaut and despite being turned down by NASA, he kept trying and was finally accepted.

80

There is a difference between being good at something, and being great at it. You can get good thru practice. But “great athletes are born, not made”.

Regards,
Shodan