Scott Sonnon posted this on Facebook:
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
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About Me
- Steven Barnes
- For the last thirty years or so I’ve been a lecturer, coach, novelist and television writer. For the last forty years I’ve been involved variously in the martial arts, and for all my life I’ve studied and enjoyed yoga. Not that I worked at it as hard and honestly as I should have—I’d be a combination of BKS Iyengar and Bruce Lee if I had. After publishing about three million words of science fiction (including the New York Times bestsellers The Legacy of Heorot and The Cestus Deception) and having about twenty hours of produced television shows (including The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Andromeda, and Stargate, as well as four episodes of the immortal Baywatch), I’ve got opinions on the writing life. After earning black belts in Judo and Karate, and practicing the Indonesian art of Pentjak Silat Serak for the last fifteen, well, I have some opinions there, as well. And having struggled to live consciously since childhood...well, those opinions are probably strongest of all.
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4 comments:
I love that man
I'm not sure I agree with this story. Like the full and not full it is true and not true. My view of the described situation would be as follows. We are all born with a certain potential for anything we care to undertake. How close we come to that potential depends on how much effort/practice we put into the area. But, we all have only so many hours to devote to "practice" so my definition of wisdom would include a recognition of that and the selection those areas I will put my effort in based upon which are firstly most important to me and secondly in which I have the most talent in. I think if you give a child just the "practice" advice without the selection advice you are setting them up for frustration later on.
She was playing catch, Marty.
I think the advice given was more appropriate for that than telling her that she should be selective about even playing catch in the first place.
I was not saying that someone should not do anything that they do not excel at. I do, enjoy and participate in, many things I am not good at. A message I often give my grandson when he gets upset about losing is that it is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. But there are times in life when one makes critical decisions about ones future where they must recognize their talents and limitations or they mat be setting themselves up for failure and frustration. One of the most important moments of my life was the week in my freshman year at college when I realized that I had small talent for my chosen field of Physics and a much larger talent for Mathematics and made the needed switch to being a math major.
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