Point blank, it makes us feel better as the sayer of these things… but it’s not beneficial to the listener.

You can do anything, you can be anything.  I heard that when I was a kid, and still hear it now ringing through women’s circles.  We want to teach our children they too can “do anything,” but what are we really teaching them?

It send them the message that when they can’t, they’re to blame.  It’s their fault.  I told you, as the parent/authority figure, that you could do anything.  I drew the line in the sand and set the bar– and you failed.

The truth that we’re scared to teach them is that everyone can’t do everything– that success isn’t always the outcome even if they work as hard as they can; even if they keep trying over and over.  We all have natural skills and abilities, and that natural skill will boost us ahead of the person who tries and trains as hard as they can, because we’re just naturally better at whatever it is.  And thats life.

So why don’t we change the narrative.  It may seem like semantics, but it’s an important semantic because of the slight tweak in the message.

You can pursue anything.  

A small word swap; a huge meaning difference.  It now implies freedom to learn the lessons of failure, but not get tied down by the chains it can create. 

It shifts the failure from being personal to the process itself, which is what truly needs examined for change to take place and for the next attempt to be successful.

It implies that there is more than one path to achieve a goal, and with shifting that failure to the process you can now objectively look at your actions to see where you may limiting success– without self-negativity and doubt clouding the result.

And in that freedom, the power to move on if you’ve truly come across something you can’t do well enough to get the return on investment you’re seeking (read: it doesn’t make you happy or you can’t support yourself doing it).

Right now we’re impressing on our children how they’re going to spend their lives.  It’s an easy way out as a caregiver to blanket-statement say you can do anything if you work hard enough.

For a very, very small percentage of people this perseverance works.  And we see them set forth through books and movies as shining examples of hard work, and the accolades they’ve recieved as a result.

However what we fail to acknowledge is that in most of these cases their track was very singular, and the pursuit of this goal left them with very little else in their lives. 

Not a bad thing, but if we’re going to teach the lesson we need to teach all of it.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too, because in the end either something will give or everything will be frustratingly mediocre.

We have to teach the ability to be strong enough to choose.

Choose to admit to yourself the thing you thought you wanted to do doesn’t actually make you happy; or, you just flat out can’t do it.  Choose the achievement of a goal over family and friends.  Choose the relationships in your life over a goal.

Or, choose to have them all– and know you won’t have each fully but be at peace with the sections you’ve decided to have.

Our lives aren’t single-tracked– we have parallel lines running all the time.  These lines each satisfy a need we have, and when combined make up our whole person.  

The catch is not all of them have to be equally balanced to feel “whole.”  Some people need more of one line than another to feel complete.

What we need to teach our kiddos, and each other, is the strength to look at all of our lines running parallel, acknowledge which ones we need, and pursue those instead of killing ourselves pursuing all of them simultaneously… or just one of them singularly.

The strength of choice will allow you to truly, pursue anything.