"Dare to suck!"

One of my favorite movies is "Keeping the Faith". Ben Stiller plays a rabbi and Ed Norton plays a priest. They're best friends who end up both having a crush on the third member of their childhood friendship trio, Jenna Elfman. Anyway, the rabbi is giving advice to a boy practicing his Torah portion for his Bar Mitzvah. The boy is a pimple pudding of awkwardness and insecurity. His voice cracks. Stiller's character explains to the boy that "we're supposed to suck. Why else would god ask us to perform such a difficult Torah portion on the cusp of puberty? You're not a man at age 13 ! But it's a right of passage that we must all endure."
Or something to that effect. I think his point is that daring to suck at something teaches us humility, and builds endurance of character.

I think "Daring to Suck" has other, possibly more valuable opportunities.

I was listening to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. The guest was Dr. Mel Levine. Dr. Mel Levine is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Dr. Levine is also the co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, a non-profit Institute for the study of differences in learning.

Dr. Mel was talking about kids behavioral and neurological problems. He said thatthe kids he worried about the most were the high achievers. He said that those kids who encounter early success in school and life may not learn the lesson of persaverance. For kids whom everything comes easy, when they inevitably do hit an obstacle, they are unprepared for failure. In simple parlance, "it's easier to deal with sucking when you're a kid."

The problem I'm having now, at age 30 something, is that I'm one of those kids. School was always easy. In my formative years, most things came easily to me. The few things that were difficult suddenly became unimportant to me. and I gave up.

There are a few exceptions to this. I've taken dance classes. I was the only guy and I wasn't that good. I failed out of AP Spanish only to later excell at learning a language wshen I found myself alone in village of people who only spoke Japanese.