Being Positive and Working Hard Are Important…
…but not always sufficient, depending upon the goals you choose.
Social Media (and especially marketing gurus) love the “stay positive and you can achieve anything,” mantra, but it’s not always an accurate reflection of reality. There are various endeavors and goals we may choose, which depend not only on a positive attitude (which is obviously important) and on hard work (which is even more important), but also on innate talent or abilities, timing, luck, and other variables.
The difficult truth is, most people cannot do everything they dream, simply by virtue of being positive and working hard. Context matters and to take a dream out of context and not acknowledge one’s own strengths and limitations, and ones environmental opportunities and limitations, is a recipe for trouble. That can result in the type of failure that isn’t going to go away just because we “get back off the canvas and fight another day.”
A good example is professional sports. Only a tiny fraction of people among the millions who not only put in huge amounts of work and a lot of positive thought, but who have the talent and physical gifts to become professional athletes, actually can make it happen. There are things over which we have absolutely no control or very limited control (e.g. our core body type, our innate coordination and sense of balance, our innate sense of split-second timing, etc). These things have a profound impact on whether or not we can make living playing our favorite sport. You can do skills drills your whole childhood and spend your entire adolescence in the gym, but it’s not going to fundamentally change your genetic makeup.
If you got the skinny gene, hitting the gym and protein shakes all through high school won’t make you a college football player, much less a professional — unless you want to be a kicker maybe. If your eye-hand coordination isn’t naturally good, batting practice 12 months a year through your teens won’t allow you to hit a major league curve ball. All of these things *can* be improved with practice, but all have limits. This is where people go wrong: they think work can overcome all innate physical limitations (it can’t).
So for example, instead of encouraging inner city kids to dream big, that they might make it to big-time sports, maybe we should put that on the back-most of burners and encourage them to dream about staying out of trouble for four years, getting good marks and graduating, and going to college or vocational school on a scholarship. That’s a dream worth dreaming because for most kids it is attainable with only hard work and positive thinking.
This type of thinking can also be applied to business and science. I’ve been interested in astronomy and space science since I was a little kid, but won’t be a Nobel-winning cosmologist in this lifetime… not because I don’t work hard enough and stay positive enough, but because at a certain level my innate aptitude for abstract mathematical concepts hit a limit. When I realized that, I had to re-assess my goals, to set myself on a smart path. My mind simply does not make sense of the abstractions that are required in advanced mathematics. Space science is all highly advanced math, all the time. Sure, they use computers for simulations and all that good stuff, but you also need to be able to identify variables, set up complex equations and solve them on your own to advance your work. That simply was not in the cards for me, whether I visited Khan Academy or not. ;)
Similarly I’m quite sure there are many scientists who can do this sort of math all day long without breaking a sweat, and have been doing that since high school. Not because they worked 10x harder than everyone else at math but because they had BOTH innate abilities in math AND a strong work ethic. Some of those same scientists may have a helluva time stringing a long-form blog post together, while for me or you it is second nature. And they can go take creative writing classes and practice all the time — but it’s never going to come easy for them. And so at some point they wisely chose their path and not a writer’s path.
What every human being needs to realize is they were born with a mix of physical and mental building blocks, some of which can be grown to great effect with hard work and positive thinking, and some of which will always be limited but can still be functional if you put some effort into developing them. They key is to be honest with yourself as you go through your formative and early adult years, about where your gifts are and aren’t, and choosing goals and dreams consistent with the gifts you have. Then, when you inevitably fall down in your chosen path, if you stay positive and get back up and keep going… and you’ll eventually make it. Just like the marketing gurus said. ;)
