Cynics Against Horatio Algers

Some people tell their kids, "You can do anything. Maybe one day you'll be the president, or a millionaire." That's the classic American myth: rags to riches, the regular nobody becomes a star overnight.

In reality, the chances of an ordinary person being wildly successful are negligible at best, slim enough to be statistically nonexistent. You can be the president or a millionaire if your father was, but without the familial launching point those ambitions are close to impossible. It's not fair to tell a child, "You can do anything." Life is not that simple. There's no single phrase that will explain the complex interplay of aptitude, tenacity, and pure chance that defines a person's future. Maybe the oft-repeated maxims that "life isn't fair" and "you can't always get what you want" come close.

I don't mean that parents should be harshly realistic with their children. Kids live in a world of broad possibility, and it would be cruel and stultifying to destroy that. But a soaring imagination can coexist with normal expectations. If a kid wants to be an astronaut, there's no reason to say, "That's unlikely. Only a handful of people get to be astronauts. Better not to even consider it." Go ahead and play with the idea. I just wish that people wouldn't tell their children, "You can definitely be an astronaut." It sets them up for disappointment.

Perhaps this seems counterintuitive on a blog about bolstering personal confidence. However, a source of my own crashing self-esteem was academic failure. It happens to a lot of kids who didn't have to try hard in grade school and high school. People expect you to be brilliant and constantly reinforce that you're a smart kid, but once you reach college, you find out that you only know how to cope with finishing homework in five minutes, not with demanding material that requires hours of study. My identity was built around me being good at school, so when I realized at Reed that I wasn't doing well, it devastated me.

Pessimists have a more accurate worldview, but optimists are happier. How can the two realities be combined? How can I pick the hopes that won't hurt me?