For Anyone That’s Ever Been Told “You’re Not Good Enough”

Stop me if you’ve heard any one of these before:

“You’re not good enough”

“You need to lower your expectations”

“You need to be more realistic”

I’ve heard each one of these, and more in my younger years. I was sitting on the train today, just pondering my life and why I spent so much of it underachieving. I recalled a moment where I was told when I was younger and expressed the desire to get a black belt in martial arts that I “needed to be realistic”. All of a sudden I recalled another moment when I was much younger playing cricket where I was told I wasn’t good enough to consider going up a grade. Not, “you need to play more”, not “you need to practice harder”, just flat out “you’re not good enough, you need to be more realistic”. Imagine being a 10 year old kid and hearing that. Needless to say it killed any desire I had to keep playing.

The more I thought about it, the more I remembered moments like these. Until a few years ago thanks to this kind of negative reinforcement, I sort of just believed that I was as good as I was, and that was kind of it. I never tried to get any better at anything, because no one had ever told me I could. When kids are told one thing more than any other, they don’t put two and two together that all those adults might be wrong. If they’ve been taught to respect their elders, they just assume what they say is right until they hit adulthood. By then it’s too late. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t live a tortured childhood or anything like that, but all of those moments where people said such things added up. They added up to me wasting my potential at school and squandering any chance of starting a good career in my 20s.

Something great happened one day though. I began doing judo. Not only was I told that I could be as good as I wanted to be, I was expected to always be giving more and more, to get better and better. There was never any bullshit talk about natural ability or talent, it was all about work. No one ever told me to limit my expectations either – in fact, I recall wanting to begin doing fight nights at judo, and the coach said to me “look, I can tell you’re hungry and you aren’t a beginner (I’d trained in jujutsu before judo), but you aren’t quite ready yet. Keep it up and you’ll get there soon”. Likewise later on when I wanted to go up a grade, my coach said much the same thing. Because it was just a matter of training harder and getting better, I kept on training in the knowledge that I’d get there. Finally, a recognition of potential instead of a shutdown!

After that I joined the army. The army is all about encouragement. They throw test after test at you that you have to pass, and by the end of training you can’t help but become almost arrogant in your self belief. After that I got a distinction average doing my master’s degree, I started competing at judo nationals and winning local comps. I actually started to achieve things. The amount of achievement I’ve had since I turned 30 (I’m 34 now) contrasts starkly with everything I didn’t achieve in the 30 years before that.

So what’s the point of this post? The point is that whether you’re a parent, mentor, coach, teacher or any kind of “authority figure”, you have a responsibility, an absolute duty to help people reach their potential. Even if someone doesn’t seem to have any kind of ability, you have no right whatsoever to tell them they can’t do something, that they aren’t good enough, that they need to be more realistic. If you think they’re being unrealistic, tell them exactly what they need to do to get to where they want to be – either they’ll surprise you and do it, or they’ll figure it out on their own soon enough and decide that it’s too difficult. Either way, you haven’t been the one to tell them they couldn’t do something. Even the very best coaches, teachers and mentors aren’t all knowing, all seeing gods that can predict the future. History is littered with people that defied the limitations that others put on them to achieve greatness.

Ed Corney (above) didn’t enter his first bodybuilding contest until he was 33 – far past the age of the other competitors. Yet he managed to eventually place 2nd at the Mr Olympia event and is considered one of bodybuilding’s greatest ever posers. He was never told “you need to be more realistic”.

It makes me wonder – at what point does a person believe they have a right to shut someone down (even worse when they’re young and impressionable) and kill their dreams. If you’ve ever done this to anybody, you need to take a good look inside. I’ve come into contact with a few of these people over the years, and it wasn’t just my dreams or potential they killed, they did it to many others. Some of them even did it to their own children, who now despise them, and rightly so.

For everyone else, don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. That you’re not good enough. That you need to be realistic. Don’t ever allow anyone else’s limitations define your possibilities in life. One of my favourite quotes is from powerlifter Mark Bell, who was constantly told when he was growing up that he was stupid and wouldn’t amount to anything. Quite a few years back he said:

“Anytime anything like that has happened to me, I view it as giving me bullets. I have a lot of bullets in this gun nowadays, and I have a lot of people to gun down. When something shitty happens, I say to myself, “That’s a good one. Thank you. Now I have more ammo, motherfucker.”

This is how I get now when people say negative, limiting bullshit around me. It literally makes me angry inside, because negative assholes defined and limited my possibilities for 30 years. Sometimes now if I’m in the mood, I’ll have a little fun and just see what sort of limitations people try and put on me. I was travelling with some work colleagues a couple of months back and reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. They asked me why I was reading that and I told them I planned to retire from full time work by the age of 50. One of them thought it was brilliant and told me to go for it, but judging by their reactions the other two thought I was off my rocker. The point is, I don’t need their approval or their support to do it, and you don’t need anyone else’s approval in whatever endeavour you want to succeed in. So when someone tries to limit you, to define you, shrug it off, say a silent “fuck you” and show them that you can do whatever the hell you want to do.

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