When a person needs encouragement, we often lift their spirits with “You can do it” or “You got this!” We tell children at a young age, “You can accomplish anything you set your mind to!” While these sorts of affirmations come from a place of kindness, I’ve always found this sort of talk disingenuous and unproductive. Can I do this one task that I’m struggling with? Likely-- but not inherently. Am I capable of anything? No. And neither are you.
That is not to say we need to go around quashing hopes and dreams. The encouragement of children is vitally important to their future outcomes, and maybe they should believe that they can do anything. But in adulthood, that belief often bumps up against a contradictory reality, and we find ourselves unprepared. It is when we reach these situations that the same encouragement we are so keen to offer children can come across silly— or worse, callous and delusional.
It is the ideal that people fall in love with. We want to be able to do it all, have no limitations, believe in the strength of our will and the value of work ethic. We need to believe it, or else our range of motion becomes much more limited, and the reality of our limits stops us from even getting close to them.
If you set your sights on writing a New York Times bestselling book, the implausibility of that goal may impede progress in the moment. Instead, reframe your ambition to something actionable. Start with “I want to write a book”– maybe you can’t sell one million copies, but you could sell ten thousand, or one hundred thousand. The idealized version of what “success” looks like is, itself, a limiting factor.
Realistically, many limits are outside of our control. Disabilities, racial injustice, gender gaps, class warfare. These tend to be some of the hardest limits in life, and often are determining factors. It is more likely for people in low-income areas to stay in low-income areas than “overcome adversity.” It is a reality in the United States that your life may be cut short just for being the way you were born, whether that’s at the hands of race or sexuality or gender. It is ignorant and condescending to look at people with inherent disadvantages and say “well you can be anything you want to be, if you work hard enough.”
There is a balance here. It is possible even in a broken system to overcome limitations, but it tends to come down to luck and circumstance more than character and hard work. Rather than deny the limitations, then, we should actively acknowledge them and work, as a society, to reduce and ultimately eliminate them. As is so often the case, inspirational sayings, philosophizing, and self-help are for personal, internal use. They are not to be delivered to others in order to stop a conversation. “I had to struggle and I survived, you do it too” is inhumane; rather, “I had to struggle— and now I can help” is the pinnacle of success. It is human.
There are always two factors at play: internally, people who have known, real, valid limits should not let those limits stop them from trying; externally, people should see others’ limits and help to remove them. The use of “work ethic,” “grit,” and “bootstrapping” to hide actual problems seems like an archaic concept, and we must put it to rest as a society. Acknowledging that the limits exist is the first step to fixing them. Only when both internal and external factors are working can we start to make progress.
Edited by Jeremy Harr
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Wow! I never thought of encouragement this way. I'll have to rethink how I encourage who. It would be interesting to know what harm is caused by encouraging someone when it doesn't fit their life. I like it, another thought provoking treatise.
“I had to struggle and I survived, you do it too” is inhumane; rather, “I had to struggle— and now I can help” is the pinnacle of success.
Makes me think. I am often of the mindset hard work is the answer. Raised on lines like, “big layoff today, only the best men kept”, “get going you malingerer”, and “no loligaging around here”, epitomize this push for success but maybe are too old-fashioned and don’t resonate with today’s thinking.