While listening to a baseball game the other day, I heard the announcer tell a story about his eight-year-old son. Earlier that day, he had taken him to the pediatrician’s office for a routine visit.
The doctor asked his son what he liked most about himself.
His son replied, “I like to play baseball, and I have a lot of friends.”
Of course his dad, the radio announcer, loved that first answer.
The doctor then said, “I want you to know that life is sometimes tough. You will have good times and bad times. And when those bad times come—and they will—I want you to remember what you like about yourself. When you do that, the bad times will seem less bad and less long.”
What great advice—and not only for a child.
How many of us have lost that?
I’ve thought about that little boy’s answer ever since. He didn’t say he was fast, that he had good grades, or that he was better than the child next to him at anything. He said he liked to play baseball and had a lot of friends.
There was no comparison in it. It was simply his, the way a child names what makes him happy before anyone has taught him to measure it against someone else.
That’s the part we lose.
I have always believed that each of us has at least one special gift, talent, skill, or interest. What did you love as a child? What did you love to do? What did teachers notice in you?
Most of us can still find our way back to those things if we think hard enough. What we lose is the freedom to simply like them without needing to be the best or needing them to prove anything.
Then life begins measuring us—in classrooms, on teams, at jobs, and in rooms filled with people against whom we compare ourselves. Before long, many of us are measuring ourselves by standards that were never built for us.
I know this one from the inside. In third grade, I was placed in the remedial reading group. I was the only one in it. Just me, alone in a corner, with special materials. I carried that for years—not just the fact of it, but the story I built around it. I told myself that I wasn’t a good reader.
And once you tell yourself something like that long enough, it stops being a description and starts being an identity. It wasn’t until college that a professor looked at something I’d written and saw a different truth entirely—that I had a real ability to express myself in the written word. One person, paying attention at the right moment, undid what a label had done for over a decade.
That’s the thing about the words we attach to “I am.” We think we’re just describing ourselves, but we’re actually building a cage and locking ourselves inside it. “I am not a good reader” isn’t a fact about a nine-year-old boy’s ability that year—it’s a sentence that boy carried into adulthood as if it were permanent. Adults do this constantly, just with more sophisticated language. I am not creative. I am not a numbers person. I am not the kind of person who finishes things. We say it so often we forget it was ever a sentence we chose, and not a verdict handed down from somewhere else.
That sentence—I am not a good reader—wasn’t really about reading. It was fear, and I mistook it for a fact. That mistake is what led me to write a book, years later, about exactly this.
There’s a familiar quote that goes: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” I was a fish being graded on tree-climbing in that reading group, and for a long time I believed the grade. A fish that spends its whole life being told to climb doesn’t just fail at climbing—it stops believing it can swim. That’s the real damage. Not that we’re bad at the thing we were never built for, but that we forget the thing we were.
The doctor in that story wasn’t just giving a nice line to an eight-year-old. He was handing him something to hold onto for the rest of his life. Because the bad times are coming—the diagnosis, the layoff, the friendship that ends, the moments life gets it wrong about you. And in those moments the world will not be gentle about reminding you of where you fell short. It rarely brings up your gifts. If the only voice you have in that moment is the world’s voice, you will believe it, the way I believed mine for years.
But if you know what you like about yourself—really know it—you have something to stand on. Not a shield that keeps the hard times away, but a floor that keeps you from falling all the way through. I found mine late, and by accident, because one professor happened to notice. I sometimes wonder what those years would have looked like if I’d found it sooner, or if I’d never let “I am not a good reader” become something I introduced myself with, even silently.
So maybe the exercise is worth doing plainly, the way that boy did it. Not what you’re good at compared to others. Not what looks impressive on paper. Just—what do you like about yourself? And just as important: what sentence have you been carrying around that starts with “I am,” that was never actually true, or stopped being true a long time ago, but nobody told you it was safe to put down?
I don’t know if that radio announcer realized how much his son’s answer would end up meaning to strangers listening to a baseball broadcast. But it landed on me. Life will hand you bad times. That part isn’t optional. What is within our reach is whether we walk into those times having already forgotten who we are, or whether we walk in still holding onto it.
Hold onto that. The hard days will still come—they always do. But they’ll feel less bad, and less long, if you’ve remembered who you were before the world told you who you should be.
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