I can do this

Author Jane Smiley came to Google today to read from her new book and talk briefly about anything the intimate, primarily female audience fancied asking about. Smiley is quite successful, with twelve novels to her name, a Pulitzer Prize, and horses. How can one be unhappy who has novels and horses? She isn’t. In fact, she looked quite pleased the entire time she spoke. She said, “When I was a child, I knew I was going to be a novelist.”

I’ve always been amazed when people approach me with this level of conviction. For sure, I have had my moments where I knew I was going to do something, and by golly, I did it. These goals have ranged in complexity from painting my living room to learning to skate to getting a master’s degree. But I have never with utmost certainty declared a career path, or a relationship path, or a family path. I guess I always thought, “Well, how can you be so sure of that?” I have received conflicting reports as to whether life is mostly hard work like shoveling rocks or luck like the lottery or half and half like roadside diner cream. It seemed folly to declare an ambition as if it was sure to become fact. The fear of running into someone I knew one day while I was hawking cars at the dealership and having that person say, “Hey I remember you — didn’t you say you were going to be an astronaut?” was real and terrifying. This has happened to some extent, already. Simply replace “hawking cars” with “drawing widgets” and “astronaut” with “veterinarian” and you’ll recognize a familiar tragedy.

Perhaps therein lies the dilemma. To be it you have to know it. It’s more than believing it, like those stupid inspirational posters on the ceiling of your orthodontist’s office, it’s genuinely knowing that you are the person for the job.

Obviously, even if you “know” something that in reality has a .05% chance of working out, it probably won’t work out. It’s likely that if I said, “I will win an Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating,” I wouldn’t succeed. There are a number of reasons for this, just a couple being I’m not sixteen years old anymore and I haven’t taken figure skating lessons since I was in elementary school. But we sell ourselves much shorter long before we even get to goals as glamorous as international sports championships. We disparage ourselves when it comes to things we have a 70%, 80%, or even 90% chance of achieving. We stop at “I’m too dumb to start my own business,” and “People who play the piano are so much more talented than me,” and “I have no luck in love.” Starting a business, playing the piano, and getting a date are not Olympic endeavors, yet many people fail without trying, effectively defining these ventures as the world’s most elusive aspirations.

I don’t mean to imply that everyone suffers these bouts of introspective inadequacy. Clearly, Ms. Smiley steps forward with poise. I know some supremely confident people who are either true to themselves or delusional, but either way, they aren’t often defeated before they begin. It is of course possible to be imprudently arrogant, but the company that I keep seems much more prone to the blue end of the spectrum than the red.

How then, does one “be” and not simply “believe,” or worse, just “wish”? Maybe the answer is simple. Maybe it’s just “do.”