Wants and Capabilities

(Photo by Maksim Chernyshev at Scopio)

If we put last week’s extra edition together with what I said in January about recognizing your capabilities, it’s natural to think about balancing what we want with what we are capable of doing.

Success feels good. We like feeling good, so we tend to want to do and like to do more of what we do best. We get even better at it, so we succeed even more, which feels even better… It’s a virtuous circle.

If you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, trying to reach the goal you want is doomed to failure.

Failing feels awful.

Thus, to really like to do something rather than only being able to fantasize about it, you need to have tools and skills to make it feasible for you to succeed if you pursue the desired goal.

Certain people don’t get to learn the “hard” subjects. That closes every door those subjects could open. It can be girls wanting to go into mathematics or physics, boys wanting to take care of toddlers in day care, any type of minority wanting to take up any profession where people of their minority group are rare.

During my teens and twenties, career counseling usually started by asking what you like. When we’re young, most of us haven’t built up enough of a track record to have a full picture of what our best capabilities are and in which direction we could make the most progress. We also don’t have a clear picture of what is really involved in different types of work. What we think we like is more rooted in personal imagination than in reality.

Right now a great many young people are getting ready to take tests of the knowledge they’ve absorbed so far. The tests are mostly limited to exactly that, knowledge. For the most part we aren’t good at testing anything else. What else do I mean? Critical thinking, ingenuity, creativity, scientific investigation, spatial visualization, foresight, strategizing…

The Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation warned me against anything like a field technician’s job because my fine motor skills weren’t good enough, and said I couldn’t blather fast enough for a career in sales. They were right to guide me away from those options. But their testing also spoke volumes about what I could do better than the vast majority and their debriefing showed what kinds of work would allow me to rely most heavily on my strengths.

As young people go into major tests of their academic prowess, they also face decisions about what to do next, what to study, what type of work to seek. If they ask us for advice about this, we can ask what they like, but we shouldn’t stop there. We should help them see what their strengths are, looking at more than academic performance, and what they can take up that will especially need their combination of strengths.

Their decisions aren’t a matter of what they like to do until they have a sense of where they are most able to succeed.

Success will feel good. Succeed at something and we’re more inclined to like doing it. Wanting to do it springs from that.