to katie: you can do anything, not everything

Dear Katie: When you were a toddler, you loved Madeline. You listened to every story read a hundred times, you watched every show, and your third birthday party had a Madeline theme (just for fun, ask your Mom about the cake at that party and see if she punches anything - the frosting was deep deep blue, and there was looooooots of it). It's easy to see why you loved her: your family has a deep personal connection with France, and Madeline rocks.

Also, when you were a toddler, you were good at almost everything you tried to do. You could learn songs quickly, pronounce words pretty well, and identify letters and numbers and shapes very easily. Plus, you loved to do new things, so you asked to do things a lot, which means you got to do a lot of stuff most little kids don't get to do (my favorite being: take your first picture from the top of the Eiffel tower so you would remember where Madeline lived - it wasn't why you went to Paris, but once you were there, it was a cool thing to ask).

Not everything came easily, though. Learning new things often takes practice, and you had very little patience with yourself for anything but perfection. I remember one spectacular meltdown because you couldn't get the sheets on the bed to be perfectly straight by yourself (the secret was for you to get off the bed first, but you clearly thought we were all nuts for suggesting it).

Your mom and dad were starting to worry about you a little bit, because you expected so much of yourself, and you got so unhappy when you couldn't do things by yourself on the first try. Madeline to the rescue! You saw a Madeline video where she said, "You can do anything, but some things take practice."

Finally, someone you trusted had said that you may not be able to do everything perfectly on the first try - because you absolutely trusted Madeline. Way more than your parents, or me, because all of us were clearly nuts a lot (it's a look you still give us from time to time, in fact). So when you didn't remember your dance steps, or how to write your name, or how to color inside the lines, your mom and dad could say, "Remember honey, you can do anything, but some things take practice" and you would calm down and let yourself practice until you got it right.

The saying is just as true now that you're a tween, of course. As it turns out, a lot of things come naturally to you - you are good at physical activities, mental challenges, and the social aspects of life. There are very few things that you could not learn to do very well if you set your mind to it.

So, from one person with a lot of blessings and gifts to another, here's the secret catch: you can do anything very well, but you cannot do everything very well all at the same time.

You can't do everything
Because almost everything takes practice before you're really good, there are not enough hours in the week to become excellent at volleyball and golf and swimming and water skiing and martial arts and classical dance and ballroom dance and hip-hop and piano and singing and math and science and history and writing and painting and sculpture and music and film-making and interior design and waiting tables and astronauting (your first answer to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "Well... a waiter... or an astronaut").

You can't do everything very well
Now, sure, there is enough time in a long, full life to try all those things. There is plenty of time to learn something about all of them. But trying them doesn't mean you are going to be great at any of them. Being great at something almost always requires that you spend many many hours dedicating yourself to practicing.

You can't do everything very well all at the same time
Most people have a choice: either you can learn a little bit about a lot of things, or you can learn a ton about one or two things. Like me, for example. Since I graduated from college with a degree in theater and creative writing, I have not kept up with the American theatrical scene. I have not seen most shows that have been on Broadway in the past 20 years. I do not know who the hot American playwrights are these days. I have not even see all the movies nominated for Oscars for Best Movie for the past ten years or so.

But in the time that I have lost touch with the America theater scene, I have learned a ton about Christianity, church-planting theory, analyzing data, building databases, writing requirements for computer software projects, managing projects, managing people who write software and analyze data, giving professional presentations, and the technical challenges facing our legal system.

But I didn't learn all those things all at once. I probably learned how to be good at those things one or two at a time, and each of those things took a couple of years to figure out. Some of them took five or ten years before I finally felt like I really knew what I was doing.

You have to choose what you practice
There are still lots of things that I am not very good at. For example, I am pretty good at managing programmers and data analysts: I can usually get a group of programmers to do a pretty good job and end up pretty happy that they are working for me. It sounds easy, but it is not. Lots of people hate managing programmers. Programmers are famous for having strong opinions and not always being the most polite when they disagree with you (your Uncle Kevin is, of course, an exception to this rule... usually).

But I am just not good at managing non-technical people. I don't know why. A couple of times I have tried, and more than once, people's job performance gets worse, and they are less happy with their job than they were before I was their boss! Ouch! That is not a good combination!

So I have a choice: either I can choose to throw myself into learning how to manage non-technical people, or I can accept that I am not good at it, and try to avoid doing it. And, if I spend a bunch of time learning this new skill, because I am not very good at it to start with, all those hours are time that I am not learning how to do something else.

So practice what you love
Sometimes it's worth it to learn something really really hard, even if you are not very good at it to start. For example, learning to cook well and bake well are extremely hard, but almost everyone can benefit from knowing how to do it. You will almost never be in a situation as an adult where being a very good cook is a bad idea. Being a very good cook makes it easy to throw parties, have guests, and let people know you love them. Cooking is a general skill that is helpful every day for everyone, because people have to eat. And cooking is something you can learn in an hour or two per day over many years - you do not have to drop everything else you are learning just to learn it. So if you are not a good cook to start with, but you want to learn, definitely keep at it - it'll be worth it.

But something that is not as useful every day, like mountain climbing (especially because you live in a very flat part of Texas) may not be a good idea to pursue unless you are willing to give up learning a lot of other things to learn it. It takes a lot to learn, and you would have to stop learning other things in order to be good at it. But if you really really love mountain climbing, and you dream about it all the time, then yeah, go ahead, learn everything you can about it.

Now that you're going into middle school, you are going to have more choices of things to learn: more after-school activities, and your friends will be doing a wider range of things. When you look at all your friends together, sometimes it may feel like they know how to do more things than you do, but if you look at them one by one, each one of them probably knows just about as much as you do. You have ridden horses at camp and studied martial arts and hip-hop, while another friend may have danced in the Nutcracker and be very good at science, and another friend may take excellent pictures and speak Portuguese. But probably nobody your age has done all those things.

The important thing is you keep learning about what you love. If there are things you love learning about, learn more, any way you can. Ask people, read books, take classes - any way you can learn, you do it. Chances are that whatever it is you love, other people love it too, and there is probably a great way to make a living doing that thing. Many people pick one or two things to do very very well, and they spend their lives continuing to work to be the best at it.

But you may find out that you are the kind of person who just loves learning new things more than you love practicing any one thing for many years. Ask your Uncle Kevin - that is how he is. He learns more every week than most people learn in a month. He reads about new things, tries new things, and builds new things as often as he can. His life will always be full of new information and new skills, and it makes him very interesting to talk with because he knows a little something about lots of topics, so no matter what you think of, there is a good chance he knows something about it (and if he doesn't, he'll make up something silly, so it's always fun to ask).

I am also a person who loves new things - I am perfectly happy learning new skills every few years, and I would not want to do the same thing at the same job for ten years in a row. And I am very happy being just an okay water skier, an okay swimmer, and not very good at all at painting or decorating or cooking. I loved learning about all the things I know about, and I am not sad about the other things I have missed.

Well, maybe I'll learn to be a better cook. Some day. But don't hold your breath waiting for it.

Love,
Aunt Angie