When I was 12 years old, I took a chance and tried out for the basketball team. I had never played basketball in my life; I wasn’t tall; I wasn’t a terribly fast runner, but I had the desire and determination. I showed up to practice, worked hard and did whatever the coach told me to do.
Guess what? I didn’t make the team. Why? Because I knew absolutely nothing about playing basketball, and I had all the raw athletic talent of Screech Powers from “Saved By the Bell.”
The moral of the story is that no matter how much desire and determination you have and no matter how hard you work, if at least a little bit of talent and ability aren’t there, it ain’t gonna happen.
I thought about that a lot this week as I watched the TV show “American Idol.” If you’ve never seen the show, it works like this. About 10,000 people show up at various major cities across the country to sing their hearts out for three people who either reward them with a trip to Hollywood or send them home. Some of the people who show up are so bad that they simply defy the imagination. One guy showed up and simply read the lyrics off a piece of paper. The sad part is, he thought he was good.
That’s really what’s truly mind-boggling about this show. These kids show up and either nobody has ever told them, “You suck,” or they are simply that delusional.
When the judges tell them that they haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of making it as a singer, they get defensive and tell the judges things like “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” or “What do you mean that was horrible?” A lot of these people leave the audition still thinking that they are truly gifted and that the judges just can’t or refuse to see it.
Now in fairness, these judges are not the be all and end all of musical talent scouts. I seriously doubt that Bob Dylan, John Lennon or Jim Morrison could have gotten past the first round, but that’s just my take. Janis Joplin would have probably been told to smile more and sing happier songs. Still, a truly bad singer is a truly bad singer regardless of who does the judging.
How did we get to this point? Why are there so many people out there who honestly think that they are the cat’s meow? I think part of it is that we have become so obsessed with protecting people’s feelings that we have created a bunch of would-be prima donnas who chafe at the first hint of criticism. These people are told that they’re better than they are; they don’t have the goods to back it up, and when they get into the real world, they can’t deal with it. Perhaps we should examine what we tell kids.
I remember several times during my formative years hearing the phrase: “You can be anything you want to be if you set your mind to it.” No, you can’t. I can set my mind to becoming 6 feet 5 inches, but it ain’t gonna happen.
I also remember hearing, “You can accomplish anything with hard work and perseverance.” Oh really? Why don’t we put that one to the test. Go out and find a brick wall, like the one behind the Swalm engineering building. Now let’s try and move that brick wall with just hard work and perseverance. Push on that brick wall with your bare hands as hard as you can for eight hours a day for the next few days. I guarantee two things: you will work hard, and you won’t move that brick wall one centimeter.
The point is that at some point, you need talent to go along with your hard work and determination. This is not to say that children should be taught to be content with failure, but neither should they be given false sense of self by means of an inflated ego and unrealistic expectations.
Tony Odom is a graduate student in the history department.