Ready to be So-So

In “So What’s So Bad about Being So-So?” Lisa Wilson Strick expresses her idea that despite proficiency, we should make an attempt to participate in things we are unfamiliar with. In fact, in today’s vying society, being amateurs for fun is unacceptable since we must be professionals of everything including our pastimes: we have to be well-equipped and to be utterly devoted. Moreover, not only do adults vie with others but so do children who regard their leisure pursuits as contests. Therefore, without remarkable achievement, most of us avert activities we cannot deal with “seriously.” However, we, like manias, take “recreation” as a way of enhancing our ability; in fact, we should learn to be tyros again, taking delight in fiddling around inventively.

Regardless of expertise, Strick’s encouragement of trying new things does arouse our concerns over the fallacy that we must treat everything as well as our hobbies with perfection. Indeed, being a specialist in a certain field is compulsory in today’s collaborative society. Thus, we are inevitable to compete with others for being qualified for the position: The position in work and even in play. In other words, we dedicate our time, money, and energy to mastering our recreational activities thoroughly. For instance, sports fanatics in running are fastidious about sportswear like “sixty-dollar running suits and fancy shoes” and those zealots in dancing vouch for “sweating through six hours of warm-ups and five-hours of ballet and four hours of jazz class.” Now “competition” becomes a stimulus for achieving great success. Nevertheless, to ensure accomplishment, we hardly try something new; instead, we take the road we have taken repeatedly.

“Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.” Louis E. Boone, an American academic author, writes about his opinion on strives for discovering new things. Similarly, Strick’s statement has corresponded to that of Boone: we could have enjoyed the fun trying new things; we might have raised a possibility to break our limits by trying something new; we should have taken pleasure in meddling with new things like starters. For example, without professional pursuit in sports, children could have enjoyed each other’s company from which they could learn new things together. Moreover, a housewife might have developed a foreign language skill by trying learning the language instead of spending her time doing regular chores. Finally, each of us should have played around things we first try like two-year-olds.

We might draw back when we risk our careers in trying something irregular; by contrast, we can try different things without any loss at our recreational activities. To be honest, it is crazy to treat our recreation, which is a way of spending free time for amusement and enjoyment, as a profession. The main purpose of trying new things is not achieving goals but having fun in experiencing the process of fooling around our first try.