Is Kendrick Lamar handy with a hammer?

How’s Saoirse Ronan’s volleyball serve?

Sure, David McCullough is a revered writer, but can he write funny tweets?

We really don’t care. These greats are valued for their contributions to our culture — we don’t need them to be good at everything.

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I’m not sure who we have to blame for it. The Puritans? The media? Regardless of where it came from, so many of us have the same problem: We think that doing something worthwhile has to be difficult.

Consider exercise. So many people say that the hate working out. Honestly, if the only way that I could get exercise was to show up at a gym and operate some machinery in a fluorescent-lit room, I would hate working out too. But there are lots of different ways to stay fit. Gardening, building stuff, hiking, playing games…there are a million ways to get some exercise while having fun or accomplishing something meaningful. Why do so many of us assume it has to be miserable?

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“How long does it take to learn to play the guitar?”

I get this question all the time. Wanna guess what the answer is?

You guessed it: It depends. It takes a few weeks to a few years to become proficient, depending on how much effort you put in.

I also frequently get the question, “How long does it take to get good at the guitar?”

Now that is a really different question. The answer, for anyone asking it, is you never will.

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“The bottom of the nose belongs down here, and the eyebrows should hit here. You can improve the perspective on the house in the background by incorporating these lines. Also, why is the sky a strip of blue at the top?”

We know that there are developmental stages that children’s artwork goes through as they learn, so we don’t expect kids to draw like adult professionals. Dena Luchsinger makes the case that it’s just as unhelpful to a growing writer to point out all of their mistakes.

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The human obsession with measurement is everywhere, and starts from our earliest moments. Our height and weight and Apgar scores are recorded when we are born. We are measured repeatedly throughout our childhoods, tracked for every developmental milestone and compared to others according to percentiles in every attribute.

A parent can become fearful about a child’s future if the child appears to be “behind” in some way. However, the truth is that we are all very different, and these measurements only go so far in helping us to identify potential problems caused by those differences.

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