You Can’t Be Anything You Want

Try squeezing toothpaste back into the tube…
That was my father's answer when I told him I could learn to do anything at all.
He was right, and it turned out to be one of the more freeing things anyone has ever said to me.

As a young boy, I recall reading an article in Readers Digest that talked about human potential, and since I was skinny and small, it grabbed my attention immediately. It offered me the fantasy of being big and strong and powerful…

The basic premise of the writer was that since we all have essentially the same neurology, we are all able to do pretty well anything that anyone else can do. This became a recurrent theme in modern NLP in the 1970s, and was touted by Tony Robbins and others. At least until reality came crashing in…

I told my Dad that I just read that I can learn to do and be anything, and expected him to agree and support my delusion. Instead, after a moment's thought, he handed me the toothpaste.

But it wasn't a chiding or mocking remark from him. He smiled at me, and went on to say that we all have different skills, which is why there's only one World Chess Champion; not billions of World Chess Champions with equal chess ratings.

And then he continued the gentle lecture, telling me that we not only all have a different set of skills, but different weaknesses too. We are all human, and therefore similar. But our skills and lack of skills made us all a bit different from each other.

I felt a bit disappointed hearing this, but Dad was an engineer, and a remarkably intelligent and logical man. He possessed legendary skills in mathematics. He died young, in 1981, when liquid crystals were becoming mainstream, and long before the boom in personal computers or even electronic calculators.

Dad did his calculations on a slide rule, which he called a "guessing stick", and kept a calculus textbook on his bedside table for light reading.

And I got none of those skills. None at all.

Nor did I get any of Dad's mechanical ability, which was legendary, but not passed on to my DNA at all.

It's almost a joke in my household that my wife has all the mechanical skills. She measures things, puts up pictures, drills holes, and uses a wide variety of tools.

I prefer to watch the process.

The other day the remote to our television stopped working, just before a crucial Toronto Blue Jays game. I assumed the batteries had finally died, and switched them for new ones. But the new batteries made no difference at all, resulting in much colorful language…

I thought outside the box, and found a free app that turned my iPhone into a remote, and it worked perfectly! But as I was busy rejoicing in my problem-solving ability, my wife cleaned the residue off the remote electrical contacts with some fine sandpaper, effectively fixing the remote.

It was a moment of both triumph and humiliation…depending on one's perspective.

Now realizing that we aren't all equally skilled or talented is not a limiting belief. It's actually a freeing reality.

I'm not just a big picture guy. I'm a huge picture guy. I struggle with too many details, which is why despite years of concerted study on all aspects of chess, mastery eluded me. I could never stop missing crucial details which led to game-losing blunders.

But when I discovered the 5,000 year old game Backgammon, everything changed. And that's because Backgammon is a big-picture game. It's all about pattern recognition, rather than calculation. And unlike chess, it enables me to move very quickly, as I recognize the position from my internal library.

So I work to my strength, rather than attempting to fix the unfixable.