Not giving up.

Talent was always a difficult concept for me growing up. I was under the impression that you were either born being great at something, or you weren’t. I thought guitarists were these magicians who were born with their fingers between frets, not just these focused people who decided to dedicate an inordinate amount of time to mastering the skill. I thought those kids who professionally stacked cups were naturally gifted with arguably the worst natural gift in the world, and this had to be the case, because the idea of a kid sitting in the dining room playing with a bunch of plastic cups for hours on end seemed pathetic. It never occurred to me that maybe when Vincent Van Gogh first started painting he kind of sucked dick at it. I wish someone had better explained this practice makes perfect shit to me because the perspective I had was totally defeating. I gave up guitar when I was 12 because over the course of a week I was not able to make Smoke on the Water sound any cooler than it already didn’t. I also decided l0 different times as a kid and a teenager to be a stand up comedian. I’d sit down at my desk with a fancy writer’s journal and a pencil and tell myself to write something funny. I would inevitably give up within an hour seeing that what I wrote wasn’t nearly as funny as any of the bits on the Emo Phillips cassette I stole from my mom. It wasn’t until my 20s that I honestly realized that I could possibly get somewhere doing comedy, if I simply didn’t give up. So that’s what I’m working on right now: not giving up.

On second thought, this post turned out to not be funny at all so I guess I'll try stacking cups again.