There’s a demotivational poster called, “Potential”, that pictures a basket of fries and the words, “Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.”
Sometimes the world seems so hopeless. Sometimes I feel like everyone around is me is so determinist, so anti-tabula rasa. “Some people are just destined to fail,” they say. It’s in their genes, or they came from the wrong family, or from the wrong neighborhood. Maybe they were born in the wrong country, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong race. Perhaps it was the way they were raised, or their teachers in school, or their peers during their formative years.
But whatever it is, some people will just fail—and telling those people that they can succeed is just cruel. Telling them they can be an Olympic medalist when they’re destined for McDonald’s is simply setting them up for disappointment. As a fellow blogger writes:
Have you ever failed at anything despite your best efforts? … there are tasks in this world that you will never be able to perform. Despite the mantra of parents and teachers that “you can do anything if you just stick with it and don’t give up”, not everybody gets to be an astronaut.
Is it so ridiculous on the face of it to truly believe that a person can do anything if they are determined enough? I’m normally one very grounded in reality—am I really so delusional to believe such a statement?
Some people try and try their entire lives just to go to college, and never make it. Gabriela Ocampo didn’t even graduate high school. She took algebra seven times, and failed the class all seven times. Did she just not try hard enough? Was she not determined enough? If I met her and said to her, “You can do anything you put your mind to,” would she break down and weep?
Bryan Caplan writes about an experiment where teaching students that intelligence is malleable improved their performance, whereas teaching students that intelligence is fixed resulted in lower grades and lower achievement test scores. He responds,
Thus, I suspect that students with who believe in malleable intelligence are more likely to go to graduate school despite low test scores. They’ll probably get better grades because of their belief. But better is often not good enough. Belief in malleable intelligence is no free lunch—it could easily lead students to waste years of their lives trying and failing.
Don’t like that example? Here’s another: Know any struggling actors? How many of them should just give up?
An MSNBC article joins the bandwagon:
One of her recommendations is for parents and educators to ditch the self-esteem movement and aphorisms such as “you can be anything you want to be” or “you have to love yourself first,” which she says have become ubiquitous in child-rearing and have contributed to today’s onslaught of unreal, narcissistic kids. Her study asserts that narcissists are more likely to have short-lived romantic relationships, lack emotional warmth and be dishonest, overcontrolling and violent. Moreover, a narcissistic child is more likely to become an angry failure of an adult, says Twenge. When you’re raised to think you’re great at everything, it can be a devastating blow when success turns elusive.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know if I’m just lucky, and that an unlucky version of me would be an angry failure of an adult, because of the noble-sounding aphorisms I was raised with.
But I can’t help but believe that you make your own luck in life, you make your own successes, and that people can change to become something much more than they were born to be. (I think that’s why the movie Gattaca brings tears to my eyes every time.) I know people have vastly changed my life, sometimes just from a simple sentence they probably didn’t even give a second thought to. If those noble-sounding aphorisms can have that same effect on somebody else’s life then, as far as I’m concerned, they’re worth keeping.
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