My father wasn’t a pessimist – he was a “realist”, so he liked to remind me.
I was fortunate to have an imagination that could build fantastical worlds transporting my current position to that of my boundless ambition. I could become entranced by almost any small input of shiny new goal to be good at and, without much effort, my ambition would latch on and allow my imagination to craft marvellous ideas that I could become great at it.
No, not that I could become exceptional, but that I would.
Going fishing for the first time? I am going to catch the biggest fish of the day! Everyone else who fishes all the time will be watching me bring in this fish, and it’s so big I’ll have to fight not to be pulled into the water or snap my rod, and they will all be so impressed that this kid landed this fish even though he’s only seven!
First time running? I will run a marathon one day.
First time in the gym to lose some weight? I will get a six pack.
Can’t even pass GCSEs? I will go to university.
If we were only limited by our beliefs, then by Jove I would have been an unstoppable force of success.
“You need to be more realistic.”
This time not voiced just by my father, but pretty much anyone and everyone who was older, wiser and more experienced, of course. They used to think like that too, but apparently it wears off.
“Just wait till you grow up,” would be chortled out.
It would be false not to accept that youthful ambition, imagination, and the dogged stubbornness I had to never accept no for an answer played some part in my eventual successes, but it would also discredit the immense practice, study, failure and mental reformation that played the greater role.
It would be unfair to the input of so many speeches, books, mistakes, injuries, embarrassing attempts, failed businesses, and general falling-flat-on-my-face-over-and-over-again to simply say, “ah yeah, but you’ve always been like that, even since you were little.”
Weren’t we all?
There is something slightly pitiable about a young child announcing that they want the world, only for adults - armed with their experience, wisdom, and accumulated catalogue of disappointment - to begin tempering that ambition through consolatory little warnings intended to save them from the doubtless eventual pain of discovering that reality has failed to conform to the world they had imagined.
And, to be fair, this is probably useful to the adult too, as it also tempers the fallout when the child discovers that despite their absolute certainty, they will not in fact own four horses by the age of fourteen.
I express my gratitude ceaselessly for the opportunity I have to work with essentially every stratum of age through my role as a coach. I work with primary and secondary school children through Union Jab, university students at Newcastle University, and adults of all ages through CGR Cooke.
What I find interesting is the steady dilution of ambition and imaginative faculty as you move up those bands; as each group becomes more learned, more experienced, more competent and, supposedly, more wise.
This seems to me a great shame, because those at the height of experience would probably benefit most from the ambition and imagination of those still in their formative stages.
“Youth is wasted on the young”, of course.
Now, I could espouse on the great shames of this topic through a multitude of lenses, but the particular one I wish to consider here is the false perception that you can’t do everything.
You can’t be everything.
“You can’t do it all.”
Bullshit.
The fallacy is not that we are incapable of fulfilling most of our wild ideas; because that would suppose that failure is primarily a product of our capacity as an individual rather than the result of objective circumstances.
Yes, in some cases, no matter how much you wish to be an astronaut, it is somewhat an irrelevant goal if you are horrendous at maths, left school at sixteen with no GCSEs, and lost both your eyes in a chip-pan accident.
Although, didn’t they blast some celebrities into space?
They didn’t need to be good at maths. Some of them can’t even get out of 4:4 timing. So perhaps the door to orbit remains more ajar than first thought, when looked at from a certain point of view.
The point is not that because somebody else has done something, you therefore definitely can too. That would be motivational nonsense.
Some people are taller than you. Richer than you. Smarter than you. Luckier than you. They may have started twenty years earlier, been born in the right country, met the right person, inherited the right genes, or simply avoided the sort of spectacular bad luck that can shut entire avenues of life before you ever knew they existed.
It does, however, prove that the thing itself belongs within the category of possible things.
That is enough to justify a better question than “why can't I do that?”
The better question is: is there a plausible path from where I am now to there?
That distinction matters enormously.
What I mean by this is that through an honest understanding of yourself, your actual abilities - objective and tested, not merely felt - paired a plan of action founded on methods that have repeatedly proven effective, many goals which appear completely unrealistic when viewed from your present position become considerably less absurd once viewed as a process.
This is where adults often seem to get the whole thing backwards.
They look at the end goal using their current ability as the yardstick and determine it to be impossible.
Of course it looks impossible.
It is the end goal.
My answer whenever someone tells me they are not fit enough to achieve a certain fitness goal is to suggest that, by the same logic, people also shouldn’t go to university unless they already have a degree.
Your ability should be considered against the process, not the payoff.
You don’t need to be good enough to do the last bit.
You need to be good enough to do the next bit.
I once coached someone with drop-foot - around 20% nervous control of his foot, meaning it simply hung in space without a brace - to be able to skip and dribble a football around an obstacle course.
Had we judged the end point against his starting position, we would probably never have started.
Instead, you determine what the first possible thing is.
Then the next.
Then the next.
The role of imagination is to allow you to see a world that does not yet exist. The role of experience is to stop you being an idiot about how you intend to get there.
These should not be opposing faculties.
This is where we return to “you can’t have it all.”
"You can’t have a career and a new family and a start-up and train to run an ultra marathon."
Well, perhaps.
But that sounds to me less like a statement about average human capability and more like a statement about timing.
Time, effort, energy and attention are all finite. Whatever lofty ambitions we might hold, we still only receive twenty-four hours in a day, require sleep, become tired, have relationships that need maintaining and, inconveniently, must perform such distracting tasks as earning money and occasionally emptying the dishwasher.
So perhaps running an ultra marathon right now genuinely is unrealistic.
That does not mean running an ultra marathon is unrealistic.
“Not now” and “not possible” are entirely different statements.
This, I think, is where adult wisdom ought to become useful rather than destructive.
If you give your imagination enough room to create a path towards an ambition, then experience should not immediately arrive with a clipboard and declare the whole thing impractical.
Its job should be to assess the imagined world.
What would this actually require?
What would need to change?
What currently occupies the time and attention this would demand?
What would have to become temporarily less important?
What could wait?
What could disappear entirely?
What price would this ambition actually require you to pay, and having now seen that price honestly, do you still want it?
That is a considerably more sophisticated use of “realism” than simply deciding not to try.
Because the constraint is very rarely that we can only ever become one thing.
The constraint is that we cannot become everything simultaneously.
An ultra marathon might require twelve months of training. A degree might require three years. A business might dominate five. Raising very young children may understandably reorder almost every priority you possess for a period of your life.
But these periods end.
Abilities remain.
Experience accumulates.
Things which once consumed enormous personal resource eventually become ordinary.
The first time you train for a long distance event, you are not merely running. You are learning how to train, how to structure your week, what your body tolerates, what shoes work, how to fuel, how to pace, how to recover, how to fit training around the rest of your life and, perhaps most importantly, whether you are actually the sort of person who will get out of bed and do it when it is raining sideways.
The second time, much of that architecture already exists.
You have changed the starting position.
And so the question becomes not whether you can have a family, build a career, start a business, write a book, run a marathon, travel, become educated, become strong, learn another language, own some ridiculous collection of vehicles, or whatever else your imagination might throw at you.
The question is simply what gets its turn.
This is perhaps what my father and all those other “realists” were getting at, albeit in a form I found considerably less inspiring.
You cannot do everything now.
Fine.
But I think somewhere in the process of becoming more experienced, more sensible and more aware of the ways things go wrong, adults become too willing to mistake that for “you cannot do everything”.
The child has imagination without competence.
The adult has competence but too often sacrifices imagination in acquiring it.
Surely the better outcome is to keep both.
To retain enough of the seven-year-old who is absolutely convinced that he is about to land the largest fish anyone has ever seen, while developing enough judgement to know that perhaps he should learn how to cast first.
Growing up should not mean becoming realistic enough to stop wanting ridiculous things.
It should mean becoming competent enough to work out which ridiculous thing gets its turn next.
You can have it all.
