Pygmalion Failure

Have you ever noticed how you get better at things the more you do them? I know, I know! It goes without saying, right? But you know this rock is covered with riskophobics, who are intimidated by others and by their own fear of failure.

My father was one of these guys ... perhaps mom was the catalyst. He was afraid to take a risk almost all the time. Thirty some years in the newspaper business and computers arrive; he's laid-off because he's too fearful of the technology to adapt. He ended his career working for a third-rate ad sheet publisher in an alley warehouse. But, you know, he was good at what he did, and he always provided for his family. But it didn't have to be that way. It's just he was intimidated by the thought of failing. They call it self-fulfilling prophecy ... Pygmalion Failure.

Anyway, I became aware of this principle while zoning on an early '90s computer game. The darn thing was hard to master, but with repeated effort I progressively improved. Why is it I can jump on a keyboard while others won't touch one?

I think a lot of it has to do with encouragement, but mostly it's a combination of innate ability and chance. I loved puzzles as a kid. And my mom encouraged me to read adult reading material at eight (I honed my incisors on Jack London). My big sister taught me to five-finger type in my teens. But innate ability is a gift of God.

God moves on a person's heart to see things in abstracts, to connect the disconnected, to assemble the disassembled, and to envision a thought or a dream: consider the Hebrew's Tabernacle in the Wilderness. Once the heart is stirred in this way, no mountain is too high, no desert too dry, no project too far. Behold the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transatlantic Cable, and the Chunnel between England and France.