It’s often touted in our work-obsessed culture that one benefits most from doing things one is bad at, to fail valiantly and to learn from those failures. This framework, taken at face value, appears to me to be a sort of extremism we should avoid.
Part of this approach is valuable; it’s obviously beneficial to an individual to take risks, make mistakes, learn from them, and adjust one’s future approach. But if we focus too much on the courage of failure and fetishize difficulty for its own sake, we miss out on an important lesson:
There are some things you’re objectively better at than others.
Risk and failure are useful to the extent that they allow us to learn more about ourselves. To misstep and grow from it is an important human experience, but what we do with that growth and subsequent self-illumination is far more important. Awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses isn’t arbitrary, but the result of years (if not decades) of methodical trial and error. Discarding this self-knowledge for the sake of more risk is akin to a star career poker player deciding to get drunk and bet his lifetime earnings on a game of craps.
There are plenty of ways to approach the practice of living, but one of these is to find realms of activity that are both easy for you and also encourage you to be creative. Doing so allows you to make the most of your gifts (both innate and acquired through the aforementioned trial-and-error process) while also leaving enough excess vigor that you can then apply to doing what you do uniquely. Being both skilled and having a refined/creative approach to the activities you decide to devote yourself to is a wonderful way to assure both success and flexibility.
There are plenty of successful people without flexibility, and flexible people without success, so in cultivating this approach towards living we hedge ourselves in a beneficial way. We mitigate the sort of risk that results from diving head-first into things we’re destined to be bad at while simultaneously making the most of our strengths.
Similarly, in a culture that’s becoming increasingly specialized, there are plenty of people who are really good at X or Y but who do what they do very similarly to their colleagues, and are thus replaceable. But to be both specialized and free enough to develop a unique approach is a rare combination. It affords you both excellence and freedom, once again a rare combination.
It’s easy to think you’re equal to (and as ‘worthy’ as) your peers. It’s easier to think that you’re better than some and worse than others. Both lines of logic ignore the fact that, yes, clichés be damned, you are wholly unique. The more self-inquiry you can do, the more you can understand how the way you function is different from others in ways both massive and minute. With this knowledge, you can fine-tune your approach and cultivate the sweet middle ground between trying too hard and trying too little: the path of some resistance.