Smart enough already

People say it about all sorts of things. I am not a numbers person. I am not technical. I could never write. I am not clever enough for that.

It is said lightly, but it does real damage, because it closes a door that was never locked.

Very little of what an ordinary working life asks for needs rare gifts. A tiny number of tasks really do belong to people born with something unusual. Almost everything else, from reading a set of accounts to learning a language at forty to understanding why a shop's sales dipped in the summer, is built out of time, repetition and attention. Some people find parts of it easier than others. Nobody is good at every part of it.

So the sentence is usually inaccurate. A truer version would be harder to say out loud: I do not care about this enough. Not enough to sit through the confusing first weeks. Not enough to look foolish in front of people who already know. Not enough to get it wrong a few times and keep going.

That may well be the honest answer, and sometimes it is the right one. Nobody has to care about everything. Choosing not to learn something is a perfectly reasonable use of a life.

But call it what it is. The barrier is effort and interest, which are yours to give or withhold.

It is almost never the brain that is missing.