Not-So-Natural Talent
When we’re little kids, we aren’t good at a whole lot of things. Saying full sentences and words are a struggle, let alone reading them. It takes us a few years to figure out going into a separate room to use the bathroom. And, we can’t pour milk over our cereal without the risk of dumping it all over the table.
But it doesn’t phase us. We struggle through books again and again until the lines make sense as letters and words, then sentences. We start figuring our bodies out, and we learn to use a toilet. Our little muscles become strong enough to hold the milk jug steady when the liquid shifts as we pour.
Most things don’t come naturally to us. We might be born knowing how to blink, breathe, and swallow, but none of us are born knowing how to ride a bike or play baseball. People might call some of us naturals at those things in life. But, none of us are actually naturals at much of anything.
We might not be naturals, but we learn how to do things. We put on our helmets and training wheels, and we learn how to ride a bike. Then we keep the helmet on when the training wheels come off. Because we are going to fall, again and again, until it makes sense. We are going to keep falling and failing. Until we figure it out.
And when we’re little, no one judges us for our lack of skill. No one tells us that maybe learning to read just isn’t for us when it takes us a while to figure it out. No one says we aren’t meant to ride a two-wheel bike when we fall over on our third try without training wheels. Instead, they help us get to our feet and encourage us to keep going. They tell us that we’ll get there.
When we’re growing up, we fail at nearly everything we try. But we also have the space to get better, so we do. We learn to play sports and musical instruments. We learn math and how to drive cars. And as we grow up, we gain enough life experience and knowledge to be better at our first attempts than when we were five.
But then somewhere along the way, we stop letting ourselves be bad at things. Baking must not be for us when we burn our third ever batch of cookies. We say that we don’t even like golf, and we give up after a few rounds of scoring well above par. And we could certainly never renovate our own kitchen. But we’ve also never bothered to try patching a hole in the wall.
It’s not that we can’t learn new things as grown ups. It’s that we’ve stopped giving ourselves space to learn how to be good as those new things. We’ve decided that we need to know how to do something well enough on our first try or that new thing isn’t worth doing. Even when we enjoy something we are truly awful at, rarely do we give ourselves the time to get better.
It’s funny that as adults, a couple attempts is enough for us to decide our potential. But not a single one of us would grow up to enjoy cycling if we didn’t get time with training wheels as kids. There would be a whole lot less books out there if less of us had stuck through learning to read and write. And professional sports, well I don’t think there would be enough grown up athletes for them to exist as we know them.
When we try something new, I think we all hope that we will be acceptable enough on that first try to keep going. I mean, we wouldn’t have tried golf if we didn’t think it could be fun to play. But most of the time, we’d rather put the clubs away and say we are bad at golf than keep tallying high scores until we get better. Then we buy a tennis racket instead.
Now that we’re grown ups, what if we just accepted that we are trying something new. That it might take a while for us to get better before we’ve got a chance at being any good. What if we stopped seeing failing as failure? What if we just let it be an inevitable part of the process?
