All You Can Do
A Platitude From Me to You
I have a platitude that I like to say. Mainly in the workplace, where I like to say dumb, encouraging things like this. It’s a phrase that feels like it says nothing and has a modicum of meaning, kind of like “it is what it is.” Here’s the phrase:
All you can do is all you can do.
What I mean is, it’s impossible for you to do more than what you can do. There’s no point in trying to do more than what you can do and, importantly, there’s no point in feeling bad about not being able to do more than you can do. All you can do is all you can do. If you did all you can, that’s all you can do.
It’s shocking, to me at least, how many people don’t internalize this as a truth and, after doing all they can do, feel discouraged or regretful that they cannot or did not do more.
Not everyone can do everything. I often give in to the belief that if I can do something, anyone can do that thing. After all I am the least competent person I know so if I can do something then obviously anyone can do that thing. This is not remotely true. For instance, I can hit all the notes in “Take On Me” by A-ha. Most people cannot.
I was not born able to do this. Babies can’t sing. Vocal range is determined by two things: One is the anatomy of your vocal apparatus and the other is training or practice. Each factor limits the other. You cannot develop your voice past what your vocal anatomy will allow. And without development, your voice can’t reach the limit of what your vocal anatomy will allow. A person might be able to get a whole additional octave through training and development but if you started with three octaves, no amount of training will get you to five. Likewise, if you start with four and never develop your voice, you’ll always, only, have four.
Because I was naturally born with a voice apparatus that supports a decent amount of notes and then practiced a lot, I can do a neat party trick at Karaoke night that a lot of people can’t.
On the other hand, I am not athletically gifted. Neither have I taken a consistent approach to developing my athleticism. There have been a few times in my life where I have devoted months or years to trying to learn a sport. I did it once with kickboxing and once with roller derby. What I learned was that no matter how much work I put in, and for however long I put in that work, I will never be as good at a sport as someone who is putting in the same amount of work and is athletically gifted. There is no amount of effort that can turn me into a great athlete just like there’s no amount of vocal training that can completely supersede the reality of someone’s laryngeal anatomy.
All you can do is all you can do.
Okay so one more thing about me: I am, if not good at singing, then at least gifted with a decent range. And I am not athletically gifted. Third thing is, I’m incredibly depressed. Chronically and in spite of taking enough psychiatric medication to knock out an elephant—which helps but doesn’t completely alleviate the symptoms.
Sometimes I can’t do something, not because it’s physically impossible for me like jumping four feet in the air like Michael Jordan or singing across five octaves like Morten Harket, but because I cannot summon the motivation to do that thing, no matter how much I want to. This is also a limitation on what I’m able to do. This is why depression is a disability.
I was talking with someone today about a situation that took place several months ago and we both expressed that we should have done more at the time to address the situation because now it’s several months hence and we’re mopping it up. However, it’s impossible to say whether we could have done more in the past, even given the benefit of hindsight. So that’s the last factor of this platitude. Sometimes you might look back and think, “I could have done more,” but as long as you know you put your best effort into something you can feel confident that whatever you did was all you could do.
It’s very easy to Monday-morning-quarterback yourself and list all the stuff you could have done differently, but all you could do at the time was probably all you could do. If you could have done more at the time, and chose not to do more, then you knew that at that time. Six-months-later you shouldn’t be allowed to make that judgment on six-months-ago you.
Anyway, as I was saying earlier, I always think that if I can do something then anyone can do it. We have established that this is not true. But most of us have some level of facility with writing. If you’re reading this Shelf Life, you are literate. You have the ability to read and write words. It’s not a natural ability, by the way, but an acquired one. Nobody is born literate. You may be born with the anatomy to hold a pen and the eye-hand coordination to write letters but you’re not born knowing what those letters are.
Most of us are at least at this baseline of “can write words.” You can think words and then you can write them. This is the level of facility of writing you need to write an email.
Then there are the all-time great prose stylists. Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, and probably lots of other dead white people whose names start with J. And Ernest Hemingway, we musn’t forget him. There are writers we are able to hold up as paragons of the written narrative and say, “these folks are the best of best. They have taken the skill of writing as far as we know it can go.” I spend a lot of time thinking about how one develops their skill to go from point A to point B.
Writing is not the same as athleticism or vocal range. Both of those depend, to some degree, on anatomy. An average person might be able to jump one foot straight up and a professional basketball player at the peak of their athleticism might be able to jump four feet straight up. The basketball player was, at some point, an average person who trained their ability to jump. The height of their jump is ultimately limited by their anatomy—how dense their muscles, how tall they are, and so on.
One’s ability to write well is not limited by any part of human anatomy. It’s only limited by the mind. On the flip side of that, though, writing well can’t be measured. It’s not like we can measure the quality of writing like we can measure the height of a jump or the range of someone’s voice.
No one is going to come behind you and say, “this writing has reached the limits of a human’s ability to write well.” I mean maybe if they give you the Nobel that’s what they’re saying to you. But the only person who can determine whether you’ve reached the limit of your ability to write is you. You have the authority to say, “this is all I can do, which is all I can do.” Or to say, “this is not all I can do; I can do more.”
Somewhere out there is the single human being who is best at a specific, given thing. Someone out there has the potential to jump higher than anyone else. Someone out there has, potentially, the greatest vocal range of our species (it’s probably Mike Patton). Someone out there must be the best writer, with the potential to write better than anyone else. For all we know, it could be you.
I am always saying some dog out there must be the softest dog out of all the dogs there are, and there’s no reason to think it’s not my dog Maxine.
But you also have to make room to be kind to yourself. Sometimes you have to be willing to say:
I can’t write this story any better than I have, this is the best I can do.
I don’t feel like writing today, I’m going to take a rest.
I’ve written all I can write for right now, I’m stopping.
All you can do is all you can do.
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The Buddhists have talked about practicing forms of compassion including self-compassion. I never quite understood the platitude until somewhat late in life... I had to expand upon it further into:
* we don't make mistakes. We made the best decision we could with the information that was available to us at the time.
and much later:
* we're not lazy. We did as many of the things expected of us with the energy that was available to us at the time.
Lots of ADHD management turned into energy management, sort of like in the simple model used in The Sims... do all this planning and maintenance to make sure your various status bars are all green precisely when your Sim jumps on the school bus or runs off to work, and success will follow... otherwise... failure.
I appreciate one of your earlier storytelling advices about letting the audience know something the characters do not, both as a way of building tension and providing dramatic foreshadowing. I'm still working on ways of shoehorning that mechanic into my storytelling, but that kind of little white lie by omission (to an imaginary person, no less) doesn't come naturally!