Is it something I can do well?

So here’s part two of the stark raving calm manifesto: Means. If you love your hobby enough (motive), and want to achieve a professional standard someday, you need to have some degree of talent or aptitude for it. This should be painfully obvious — unless you’re at all like me. See, I never met a hobby that didn’t intrigue me, and I hate the idea of not being good at something. Maybe it’s ego, or insecurity. I suspect they’re the same thing, anyway.

I warned you that there was more retrospective indulgence on tap. Might as well get it out of the way now. My high school friends used to call me Jack. As in “of all trades”. Here’s a short list of my interests at the time: reading, writing (satire and poetry), computers, art, chorus, band (flute, oboe, sax, drums, bells, guitar, piano), drama, football, soccer, tennis, jogging, comic books, Russian language, cars, and (need I add?) girls. By the time I finished college, the list included windsurfing, sailing, aviation, real-time strategy games, and chatrooms. Several semesters of engineering classes bumped writing off the list; time was short, and lab reports just don’t scratch the itch.

Here’s the thing about most of the hobbies on that list, though: I’m not very good at them. Much of that is because I didn’t put in the required practice time (we’ll cover the time factor when we get to Opportunity). I didn’t practice piano enough because I just didn’t like it that much (going back to Motive). Only a few of these interests have really stuck with me over the years. Guitar is one of those. I get paid to play in my church on Sundays, but I’m a hack guitarist at best. Most of the time I’m just trying to stay out of the way. I’m not what you would call a natural musical talent; I just love to play.

When I had to choose a college major, computers won out for practical reasons. Or so I told myself at the time. The dirty secret is that my three best friends picked engineering majors, and I went along with them. Our AP English teacher was appalled that all four of us were choosing something as “philistine” as engineering (one guy switched to journalism during freshman year; I considered journalism for a while in high school, but I had no interest in reporter stuff). I liked mucking around with PCs, had even learned BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20. I could score a computer engineering degree. I even enjoyed some of the classes. Sometimes. My SAT math score was 640; my verbal score was 770.

Sometime in the past few months, I began to remember that I was once a decent writer. I started writing longer posts to my aviation journal, and I even got a compliment or two on my style. I know I have years of rust to grind off. I also don’t have a clue what kind of writing I like best, because I’ve done so little of it lately. I still know good writing and bad writing when I read it, though, and that ought to count for something.

So there’s Means. Once again, it’s not all that counts. I used to know a girl who was a born French horn player. Her parents were prominent musicians in the state. She won first chair in All-State every year. She even had a beautiful, haunting voice. But she loved dance more than anything. “I was born into a musical family,” she wrote in a poem, “and there’s no way out.”

That’s where Means without Motive will get you. Next up: Opportunity.

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