Known limitations

Every single person on this planet is terrible at almost everything. We have a few skills we’ve mastered. A handful where we’re great. And everything else is mediocre to useless.

What follows is a small subset of my personal limitations. I acknowledge their existence and have no intentions of doing anything about them.

I am a terrible singer. I cannot dance. I have a slight stutter when saying the word ‘success’.

I will never dunk on a regulation hoop. No one will play me for my athletic abilities. I have no political skills or aspirations.

I am a very slow reader. I will never read War and Peace. I will never understand calculus.

I could go on, and on, but what actually strikes me is that I could do something about every single item on that list. I have no intentions of making any of those a priority. But, nothing is actually stopping me besides effort and time.

That isn’t to say I could take them from mediocre to mastered. But, I could take them from a limitation to an asset.

Most of us could come up with a list of items that are major weaknesses or limitations. Things that we inherited that are impossible to overcome.

If you wrote them down and thought about it, you might realize they’re not so unreachable.

As I was writing my list, I switched from thinking of things I would never do anything about to thinking of “why not?”

Sure, there may be physical limitations. We are unequal in privilege. But within many of us are limitations we put on ourselves. I have put a lot of them on myself.

There may be hard limitations. I’ll never be any taller. I’ll never make the NBA. But, a lot of limitations are not set in stone. Negotiations we can have with ourselves.