MindThe Beginner

Do you every lie awake at night thinking about what you would wish for if you ever got three wishes granted? At some point in our childhood I’m sure we all have these thoughts. Some smart kids usually make sure to wish for more wishes. Others just end up with the cliche’s of “rich” and “famous”. A bit more creativity gets wishes like “speaking all the languages in the world” or “being able to play this or that instrument to perfection”

Some of these wishes are totally unrealistic, you can never hope to master every language nor can you master several martial arts. Unlimited wishes – or actually any wishes at all – are unrealistic.

Other wishes though are skills actual people do have. Take playing an instrument for example. To master is takes countless hours and that is where most people throw in the towel. We’re so used to getting things on a silver platter that having to work for something seems to cause an allergic reaction. So we drift off into another dream about wishes and what we would wish for.

What would you give to make those wishes come true? What would you be willing to actually physically do? Would you toil countless hours, read all there is to read and fall on your face time and time again because you didn’t quite get things right yet? No probably would not now would you, that’s why you wish for things to come to you the easy way.
But lets just be honest here, things very rarely come to us that way. Every single thing does take actual work to get. Talent is one thing, but without making proper work of it the talent will mean nothing.

You can wish for all the talent in the world and perhaps you even already have talent. What sets people apart though is the willingness to go the extra mile and work hard to develop that talent or perhaps work really really hard without talent just because they want to accomplish something.

How many wishes does it take to get where you want?

Zero

Because wishes are highly overrated. All it takes is countless hours of faceplanting. Do I hear you ask how many that should be? The answer to this one should be a constant “one more is always better” because you never know what that latest (greatest?) faceplant will teach you. Take a fall, take another one and after you dust yourself off hit the dust again for good measure. No wish will ever come true, at least none of those involving skill.

Does all this sound depressing? Lets turn things around a bit.

If aquiring a skill takes countless hours, but there are people on this planet with those skills that means those hours aren’t that countless. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hours idea stating that it takes that many hours to master something. All you have to do is make those hours and you will get the skill.

Now that’s a lot of hours so lets have another round of thinking: How many people really do invest all those hours? Just a few, it’s even safe to assume that investing just 1000 or 500 hours is somewhat rare. Invest 1000 hours (or should I say 1000 faceplants?) in the skill and you can be sure that you’ll be better in it than most.

Most of the skills we want, we want just so we can show them off. Faling flat on our face isn’t exactly showing-off material so we wish, and wish. Hoping the skills will come but the failure will not. Start showing off the failures and the skill will be there, its just the other side of the same coin.

Show the skills and you show the coin…