I don’t feel like I’m great at anything. I always notice people who are, and it makes me feel like I need to be.
Don’t get me wrong: I do feel like there’s a lot I’m good at. Just not great.
But I’d really like to excel in at least one area.
Now, to some extent, maybe I’ll never feel great at anything. No matter how good I get at any one particular thing, there will always be people who are better than me.
I think this is especially true (and particularly damaging) for technical, artistic, or competitive skills, like playing an instrument, creating art, sports, or video games.
But there are other skills that I think tend to avoid that trap a bit more. For example, learning a foreign language. While there, of course, will still always be people who speak better than you, I think for me it doesn’t matter much. I have a sense that once I reach a certain level of proficiency, I will feel like I’m great at it and it won’t matter where anyone else is at.
For that reason, language learning may be an excellent choice for me if ‘being great at something’ is something that matters to me. And I think it is.
The other part of this discussion, I think, is that I should probably be focusing on the intrinsic joy that comes with learning something and improving. And I do! It is important to me and certainly keeps me going.
But I think that’s something entirely separate. I feel like this is more of an identity thing where I just need to feel like I am particularly talented at something.
And maybe that’s totally okay.
Assuming, of course, that I can actually achieve it.