This Isn’t Rocket Science!

Those who know me hear this phrase with some frequency. Why do I say it, and in what context? First and foremost it’s for self-encouragement. I was lucky to have parents, and even an older brother, who built me up into some kind of confidence machine. It’s something that I want to give my son as well.* When you see people around you performing constantly at a very high level in anything, it helps instill in you that the outsized effort they put into things often pays off. So when I say that this catchphrase is for self-encouragement, I mean that I’m spurring myself to action with the foregone conclusion that I will succeed if I put in the effort. Lucky for me, I have a short memory of most failures, too, so even if I don’t knock it out of the park, I still have this unending self confidence.** As Ted Lasso would say, “Be a Goldfish”:

The second reason I use this phrase is to instill in others that they, too, can learn to do a certain thing that they may think is beyond their capabilities. I am not going to encourage someone to start a massive home renovation if they don’t yet own a hammer, but at the same time I will also be the first to tell them that they can do it eventually if they put in enough effort and time to build the know-how. Repeatable success doesn’t happen by accident—it’s built through hard work (and often a little bit of luck). This might be self-evident, but if you want to perform at any endeavor (athletics, academics, field of work, etc) at a high level, you must be willing to work at it. 

I’d also like to take a moment to say that even the discipline of rocket science isn’t exactly the proverbial rocket science I speak of here. Elon Musk famously started SpaceX and took in a huge amount of knowledge of rocket science to make him dangerous at the outset of the company’s founding. It’s inspiring to read about. I don’t know how long it took him to do it, but he basically read through tons of books and practically committed them to memory. And though he’s also arguably one of the world’s sharpest minds, what I’m trying to say here is that even rocket science can be learned if one is willing to put in the effort. How else do we get rocket scientists!?

So there you have it. And what about you? What difficult thing have you been avoiding because it seems unattainable? It’s probably not rocket science.

*In order to get there, I think I need to do two things really well: (1) show him that my love is unconditional, and (2) demonstrate hard and smart work ethic. 

**One “failure” I will never forget is my elementary school-age soccer team. We never won a single game in the 4 years I played on the team, and it instilled in me a passionate hatred of losing.