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Continuing on my thoughts on building skills.
If you are young and you do not know what you are really good at and have found that you may not be particularly good at anything, what should you do?
As a parent, what should you advise your child to do?
My thoughts is to let’s explore and not rush.
Life is a series of exploration and every path is different.
My first recommendation would be, how about enrolling into a team sports for your kids or a team sport for yourself?
The immediate response from a Chinese parent would be
how could the child make a living in sports?
individual sports seems to payoff (financially) much better
their sporting life would be so tough and would be short lived too
My response would be
you do not expect the child to make a living in sport, he/she is suppose to pick up life learning from sports
the expected return in an individual sports is very low
sports build up resilience and happy memories in their live and good or bad time is not suppose to last too long
Truth is that there is just a very little chance that your child may be so talented or so hardworking that he/she can turn professional.
What is likely the case would be that she learn to pick up softer skills like
leading a team through failure and hopefully some success
be part of a team of people who are fighting against the odds to succeed
learn to play their respective roles to ensure that the whole wins
These are soft skills which are invaluable.
My elder girl currently is enrolled and boarding in a sports school.
In return, she had learn to become independent in her living needs, have created good memories with her teammates, become discipline in keeping with her training requirements and finally learning to work towards a goal.
All these may all lead to no championship or personal glory in the sporting arena.
But it will lead to a good life, hopefully a fulfilling one where
she learns to work with friends, teammates, coaches, teachers to try to improve herself and improve the people around her
and ultimately discover the things that she may not know now but will discover and enjoy later,
never knowing what will come but knowing that today will be better than yesterday.
For what is meaningful life but another day, hour, minute, second to just be a tad better than yesterday.
The expected return for a low probability with a high payoff sports (like tennis and golf) may equate to a high probability and low payoff sports (like toe wrestling?).