Stop me if you’ve heard it.
A young girl walks into her grandparents’ house and asks, “Grandpa, can you play the piano?”
Grandpa smiles at the girl and says, “I don’t know; I’ve never tried.”
On one hand, I like the cut of Grandpa’s jib, who knows, he might sit down and tickle the ivories like Thelonious Monk.
But more likely than not, he’d sound like a bag of hammers.
Most people, even those that have had a few lessons, could answer the same way Grandpa did.
“I don’t know; I’ve never tried.”
I’ve taken a few guitar lessons, I’ve had that $99 Fender sitting in the corner for over a decade, but I’m with Grandpa.
Can I play?
“I don’t know; I’ve never tried.”
Not really.
Never one hundred percent.
Felix Dennis wrote, “If you wish to get rich, there are no reasons why you should not get rich. None at all. For they are not ‘reasons’; they are excuses. For the most part they are pitiful alibis, half-truths, and self-serving evasions you have erected to spare yourself from the quiet terror of taking your own financial life in your hands and making your dreams concrete reality. They are the children of fear and the parents of a thousand ‘if onlys.’”
God damn Felix Dennis can write. And if you replace “getting rich” with most anything you’ve thought about doing, he’s speaking your truth.
Going all-in on something makes us vulnerable. Because if we go all-in and fail, we’d need to admit that. To ourselves and everyone else. But trying, like really trying, and failing, feels so much better even though it hurts so much more.
If feels better because it gives you freedom. Freedom from second guesses, freedom from “a thousand if onlys.”
Freedom that only comes from knowing the truth.
In an email to one of his showrunners, Anthony Bourdain wrote that, “the greatest sin is mediocrity.”
But most of us, for most things, are as mediocre as McDonald’s. We call it “good enough,” and generally speaking, I’m all for it.
The Bourdain quote is incomplete, because he was ready and willing to be mediocre in a lot of ways. Including, ironically enough, being a chef. Sobriety and tact as well.
When he said, “the greatest sin is mediocrity,” he was talking specifically about his TV show.
What he did, and what we should all do, is find those few things that we care about enough to explore to the end. So, if nothing else, we can answer the question, how good am I?
As for myself, here are a few things I’ve enjoyed, dabbled in, but have no clue how good I am or can be:
- Skiing
- Snowboarding
- Mountaineering
- Okay, pretty much anything in the cold, snow, and ice.
- Golf
- Smoking meats
- And that guitar we mentioned at the start.
Things I’m hellbent on figuring out how good I can be:
- Family (husband and father and son and brother and all of it.)
- Friendship
- Writing
The list is short. And that is a good thing. You can’t put everything into everything.
But we can carefully consider the few things that are important enough to give it everything we’ve got.
“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of,” Ryan Holiday writes in Ego Is the Enemy, “that’s the metric to measure yourself against.”
Do you know your potential?
Most will nod their head ‘yes’ until they think about it. Turns out, only a small percentage have an honest answer. Because honesty comes at a price. It requires that you put everything you have into finding out. It requires that you put in the work now, so you can live out your days knowing.
Most of us guess, justify, and bull shit, because we are scared to try.
Afraid of how it may look and feel to fail. So, we laugh it off.
“‘Good enough’ is a disease. And ‘not that bad’ is the battle cry of mediocrity.”
Those are the wise words of Casey Weathers. A guy who didn’t make it but might hold a greater distinction than many that do. He gave it his all.
Weathers said, “Hard work doesn’t guarantee you results, it guarantees you honesty.”
Honesty with yourself.
And with that honesty you get to answer with a bit more precision than “I don’t know; I’ve never tried.”
Inspired by Casey Weathers and his 2023 Recommengine award winning video:
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