You Can't Be Whatever You Want To Be

psych myself out way too much for these videos hi Bernard here you can't be whatever you want to be some people might say that's the worst thing that you could say to a kid and I would say well depends on the kid I disagree I think it's probably one of the best things that you could say to somebody let me explain now if you're like me growing up in the Western society right now when you're in school like say all the ways as far back as elementary school you're told that if you're not good at a certain subject you need to spend more time in it to improve your grades in it even though some of these things might not be related at all and someone might try to justify that it is but they aren't reading and maths are two very different things they're two different subjects that use different parts of the brain they're quite different and for people to go and say that if you're bad at reading then you better focus more on reading and less on math which is your strength well I think it's a little bit ridiculous then there's also the people who are that at school in general and I can speak from a point of being a man there's a lot of boys in school who just don't get it they don't like school it means nothing to them I had a friend when I was a junior in high school I think he showed up like thirty days out of like 180 that you needed to be in school what ended up happening was that he needed like the principal to go sign a paper to submit to the state of Illinois and then he ended up just getting his GED dropping out and then going into the military where he spent seven years in Afghanistan and Iraq now he's back and he's been handling government contracts defense contracts and he's much more successful than I am despite his shattered educational record and despite my pristine educational record it doesn't matter because at the age of 26 when I finally finished school he was out in Afghanistan he could kill people with his bare hands and well I had a degree I had two degrees perfect but there's one thing that gets hammered into just people in general and just a regular person who gets through the educational system is that in high school or middle school or elementary school that you know you're bad at math we need to focus on math even though you might not care about math even though you might in your daily life as an adult not do anything more than simple addition and subtraction maybe the occasional multiplication sometimes or reading the numbers on the Weather Channel so that you know how many degrees it's going to be that day or what the percent chance of rain is you know what a percent is right but does it really matter when I was in high school and my junior year again this was early 2000s I was in AP English 3 now if you're unfamiliar with the American educational system as it is today ap is Advanced Placement which means that you can take a course and throughout the entire year they prep you for this test that you take at the end of the year and if you get a passing score on that test then when you go to college you can submit that for semester credits so for me AP English 3 was English literature and I hated that class because it was the summer to my junior year which was the first year that my dad was retired so he sat at home all day and picked on me for not reading this summer reading book which was weathering Heights by Emily brontë considered a English classic that was written in the Victorian era of England and you know I I hated the book I was like I was looking through the names were confusing it didn't have any meaning to me at all but yet I had a teacher who at the time was well beyond the times she was a vegan feminist like she was like straight out of tumblr except early 2000s there was no such thing as as veganism as it is today yes there were vegans but nobody knew what the hell that was and she wanted us to write a feminist criticism about the book watering Heights now me as a 16 year old growing up in the sheltered suburbs of Chicago I had no idea what the hell that she wanted so I wrote some paper and she gave me an S and she hand wrote a note to my parents to say that Barnard failed paper and that he needs to redo it and that if there's any potential guidance that he can get at home I can provide him I being miss Tilson I can provide him some guidance but maybe he could use some help from home now my parents had no idea what feminism was they they just looked at it and they said oh we got a note home from Bernards English teacher Bernard is bad at English Bernards bad at Reading Bernard you're a failure simple as that and that was how they classified me they just said oh well if you're bad at reading you're going to be bad at everything else for the rest of your life how are you going to communicate with people if you can't write and you know I can write just fine I just can't write a feminist criticism of a book that I really didn't care about or understand at all so you know what my parents did they specialized in some course for me to have over the summer so that I could improve my English because I also took the AC T which if you're unfamiliar is a college entrance exam over in the Midwestern United States and in the English reading comprehension portion I scored significantly lower than I did in the math and science which I got perfect scores on I ended up getting like a 33 out of 36 which is a pretty good score but the substantially low reading comprehension was so concerning to my parents that they had me take the entire test two more times which I didn't do any better the next two times and then they had me like take some course and I thought well this is ridiculous like I'm going to be in engineering in college engineering we don't care about English which by the way I didn't do so hot in the undergrad English class either because we had another teacher who wanted more feminist criticisms of Moby Dick was the next book that I had to read and yeah I I didn't do so hot on that paper either does that make me a bad engineer no actually it made me a great engineer because I had the perfect grades for all of my engineering courses because I was great at math and science those are my strengths now if I focused more on my weaknesses what would have come out of it do i do i do feminist criticisms of books for my daily life no I wouldn't have done it in medicine I wouldn't have done it in engineering I nothing to do with anything in my life and had I focused time on that I wouldn't have gotten anything done so that's how it relates to me and if we want to go more generally maybe some people just aren't good at school like I had mentioned my friend who attended like 30 out of 180 days he didn't care about school and now he's doing better than most people who went to that school one thing that he was really good at was actually physical work and when he was engaged in the Marines he was doing that physical work now at his actual job he does physical work he knows how things are occurring he knows what really goes on in the field and because of that he applies that knowledge to a business that becomes very successful doesn't matter he only got a GED doesn't matter that he got a very bare minimum associate's degree after he came out of the Marines he focused on his strengths and with that he's now able to provide more value to other people than anybody would have imagined when he was in high school now the perception that you must always fix what you're not good at pervades into a lot of different things in powerlifting we often say that you're only as strong as your weakest link so if you're bad at the bench press in locking out you might want to try to increase your tricep strength in order to address that for the particular list if you're falling forward in the squat you might want to have more abdominal work or lower back work so that you don't fall forward so that you can keep upright better these are all the things that we talked about in that sport but when we look at it centrally you're doing the things that you're bad at in order to increase the strength for one particular lift you're not looking to do hip flexor movement to get better at hip flexor movement you're doing it in order to get better for a single lift that's really the central issue of what's going on here is that you want to do things that will make you better at what you're strong at that way you can provide more value to people and be more successful on your own now look I work in a business where there's a lot of salespeople and I've seen sales people who make great sales people but they make awful managers and I've seen managers who couldn't sell a damn thing in their life even if their life depended on it they couldn't sell it I've also seen people who are really good at managing specific things like supply chain but then when you bring them into the medical space they're awful or they have no idea what's going on or even better yet you have managers who have a team of people to manage and they have no idea because there's so many disciplines amongst their team that they have no idea how to handle any of it what I'm trying to say here is that if I could go all the way back to being I don't know 15 again I would tell myself to dabble in more things and figure out what I really didn't like what I really wasn't good at and when I found what I was really good at just hammer that to death I was a really good engineering student I don't know how good of an engineer I would have been but I sacrificed another eight years after engineering to become somebody that is not engineering I could have been a pretty good engineer I think and I would be a lot further along now as an engineer than what I am now I think what I'm very happy with what I am now I never know what I could have been but I know what I am now which may be better than what it would have been like as an engineer now I have somebody who I've known for my entire life and he finished law school the thing is he hasn't passed the bar yet it's been nine years he's working as a paralegal he's not a lawyer and we all tell him we say hey you gotta get your ego out of there and you know we don't want to tell him that he's not going to pass the bar but it's very unlikely after taking it that many times that he's going to pass the one thing that we're concerned about is whether or not he's even going to be a good lawyer to begin with right if he's already that bad and even just taking the test maybe the test doesn't correlate with how he would practice as a lawyer but the fact is is that the rules of the rules and he's not playing by the system and that he's not going to be a lawyer unless he passes that bar exam who knows he could be an awful awful lawyer and does it matter that he passed the bar if he's really bad at being a lawyer we keep telling him we said you know you can provide value to people in a much more effective way like let's say you went to business or I don't know you went into sales you would be able to do something that could be more beneficial to other people and also to yourself you might be able to develop yourself in a better way if you stop thinking about taking the bar and stop being a paralegal or somebody that doesn't even need a law degree to work the job that you have he's not focusing on his strengths and in fact he keeps hammering his weaknesses to the point where he is actually a weak person there's nothing that we can do about it he's about as weak as you can get in terms of the performance and the value that he provides to people and because of that I don't really know what to say to this person because he keeps wanting to take the test he keeps taking it and he keeps failing it I don't know how else you can say it to him other than stop it and try something else the one thing I've learned is that if you're going to fail at something like fail soon fail soon so that you can move on and that you can do something else now failing is not that failing is not a terrible thing you're going to fail at something in your life if you haven't yet and the longer you wait to fail at something the more catastrophic it's going to be the first time that you actually do fail so make sure you fill some time soon I don't mean that to be a bad thing Seiler failure is not a bad thing but it's something that you need to come out and learn from I failed many times in my life who knows maybe even this YouTube channel to be a failure I got no idea but the one thing is today if you're going to fail like fail soon so that you stop wasting time on it and that you can pull something out of it to say like I can apply this to something else that I'm going to do now the last thing I want to say is this you can't be whatever you want to be and when I say that people will go ahead and think that being is a state of one thing in that if you are a doctor then I only know you as a doctor I hate that I actually really dislike the notion of one-dimensional people I'm a brother I'm a son I'm a boyfriend a fiance I am an engineer I'm a youtuber I'm a powerlifter I'm so many different things don't just say I'm one thing and I'm not going to say that you're one thing and don't tell anybody else that they're only one thing you are as a person several different things all at once you are seven several different beings all at once don't forget that

Channel: Chubbyemu

Views: 889,529

Rating: 4.9068956 out of 5

Keywords: You Can't Be Whatever You Want To Be, life, asian parents, you can do it, strengths finder, strengths, weaknesses, weakness, weak, strong, chubbyemu, school, education, 💪

Id: asF4IEqvYw8

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/psylee123]

What i take away from this is that Asian parents come here and their children can either be STEM nerds or MD doctors ONLY. There's no other professions. Little do they know that there is just a finite number of these jobs, very very small amount, and not 100% of these very few job openings are STEM Asian profs or Asian MD doctors. Let's not forget the costs associated w/ getting an MD.

When you think about it, in Asia, is 100% of Asians either an MD or STEM prof? lmao, intuitively you know the answer is: no.

[u/hong_shao_rou]

He's absolutely right about focusing on your strengths. This is true in the corporate world as well. Find out what you're good at and continue to work at it. It's a good video all the way through, but if you don't have time to watch it, he basically provides an example of him failing at writing a feminist critique of an old English novel in high school. He talks about how he knew he was going into a technical field (engineering, medicine) and that writing feminist critiques of 18th century English books would not be a useful skill in that regard.

In the end, to apply this to AFs and AMs, we need more diversity of careers and lifestyles to truly have a healthy mentality.