You Can’t Do Anything You Set Your Mind to — but You Can Do Most Anything

I’m not sure about the wisdom in “you can do anything you set your mind to.”

In my own case, if “anything” includes playing left wing for the Minnesota Wild in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, or being the new Jim Morrison in a modern-day, reconfigured version of The Doors, well, the theory is hereby disproven. I can set my mind to these fantasies all I want; they ain’t gonna happen. And in the case of me taking on the role of Jim Morrison, at least, that’s probably good: I put on tight leather pants and I start scaring people.

But there’s one thing I do know about effort and goals and just plain trying — and mind-set. Something I’m just beginning to understand. And perhaps what good old Ben Franklin was really trying to articulate when he argued, so long ago, that “you can do anything you set your mind to.”

You can do most anything you set your mind to.

Most as in well over 50 percent. And far closer to 100 than 50.

Just not 100.

Your overall chances of success and/or completion are good, no matter what you’re thinking of doing or attempting. The odds are actually in your favor. Far more so than you might think, especially if you’re prone to overcorrecting for the likely unreachable biggies — like skating with the Stanley Cup above your head at the Xcel Energy Center, or crooning “Light My Fire” at the Hollywood Bowl.

The other day I fixed the letter L on my wife’s Macintosh. These are the high-level problems one faces in life sometimes, and it was what I was up against one morning after Adrianne had spent yet another night typing away on her computer and having to hassle with the letter L, the cover of which had come off many days before. She could still get by, and she was doing just that. She’s resilient that way. But she was frustrated too, rightfully so, both by the feel of the missing key and by the extreme precision required to type one L instead of, say, two … or three … or none.

So there I was at 8:06 a.m., still trying to wake up and having a staring contest with a little plastic, homeless L with its lovely rounded corners. And intimidation written all over it.

Like my wife – and my son Theo – had done several times, I tried to simply snap it back on to its proper spot on the keyboard. I don’t know why I thought this little strategy would pan out any better for me than it had for Adrianne and Theo, but I gave it a shot.

Nothing. Wasn’t working.

So I did what any red-blooded American male would do: I stubbornly tried again. And again. And again. And again, doing absolutely nothing different and thinking that some magical transformation would take place and success would fall out of the sky if I just kept pushing.

Nope. Not a formula for success but, I finally remembered, the working definition of insanity.

And so I was quickly at a crossroads. A decision point. A place where, in my old life, I would have given up as a flood of defeating messages began ringing through my ears:

You’re just going to make things worse.

You’re going to destroy a $1,500 Mac!

This is electronics, dude. Need I say more?

There’s a reason the Mac repair store exists. You’re it.

These messages are all in my head, literally and figuratively. My best guess is that they have layered up over time from my childhood interactions with my dad, who was a mechanical genius. I never witnessed him not being able to fix something. Not once. But when I tried to “help” him with car repairs or cabinet building or the like when I was a kid, he kept me away from it all. I just wasn’t that good at it — or so I came to believe. And I figured he was saving his energy for my older brothers, who often worked side by side with him – or so I came to believe.

But I was wrong, on both counts.

It turns out that I can often hold my own on mechanical tasks, especially if I have plenty of time to work on them. To think them through. Slowly.

Moreover, it turns out that my dad kept my older brothers away from his fix-it activities too. I always thought they were right in there, getting dirty with him. But I was mistaken, and they’ve told me so: Dad kicked them out of the garage same as me.

This new information gives me plenty of ammunition to counter the relentless taunting in my brain. So the other day, as I stared down the letter L, I decided to fire back at the voices:

I can’t do everything. But I think I can do this.

So I got on Google and started searching, flailing away with the cumbersome phrase “reattaching MacBook Pro keys.” I instantly came upon a 21-second video recorded by some squeaky-voiced little kid who couldn’t have been more than nine, and who made reattaching a computer key sound as easy as, I don’t know, picking a booger. And in five seconds flat, literally, he did just that (key fixing, not booger picking), right before my very eyes. He even had the audacity to say the word “baZAM” when he was done — as in “baZAM, there you go.”

“Why, you little ….” I muttered under my breath.

Then I tried doing what that little sh- … what that delightfully precocious young man had done. And promptly failed once again, as badly as I had the first time.

To paraphrase the great philosopher Bugs Bunny: Of course you realize, this meant war.

So I watched the video more closely. Repeatedly. And I spotted something: The space where this kid was reattaching his computer key had a hunk of white plastic in it, whereas the one on my wife’s computer did not.

“Where the $&%# did you get that, you freakin’ little #@*%@!^?”

I looked at my wife’s keyboard and saw nothing of the sort. So I did what any red-blooded American male would do: I stubbornly looked again. And again. And again. And again, doing absolutely nothing different and thinking that some magical transformation would take place and a half-inch-by-half-inch hunk of plastic would fall out of the sky and, as a bonus, attach itself perfectly on my wife’s computer keyboard, in the exact spot where the letter L was supposed to be.

Nope. Not a formula for success. But, I finally saw, the path to uncovering a backhanded, tantalizing clue.

I stared at the letter L that I was holding in the palm of my hand, partly out of curiosity, partly out of sheer frustration, partly because I had no idea what else to do. As I looked at it more closely, I noticed something: It seemed to have a faint white border.

So I picked it up in my fingers. And somehow thought to turn it over. And there, on the back of the key, was a hunk of white plastic that looked exactly like the one that that damn little … that the boy wonder had used to reattach his computer’s key.

“This thing has to come off,” I thought to myself.

Bingo.

I nursed the plastic piece off of the key, then watched another YouTube video showing how you first have to reattach the plastic part to the computer keyboard — and then reattach the key itself to the plastic part.

Boy Genius had cheated!

Well, at any rate, he had left out an essential step. Nothing important. Just the critical operation that separates defeat from victory and takes away your ability to spout off “baZAM” while repairing rogue computer keys.

I carefully reattached the white piece of plastic to my wife’s computer keyboard. Then I watched Boy Genius’s video one last time, did what he did, and — take this, kid: baZAM. One L key, back in business.

When Theo got home from school that day and went to use Adrianne’s computer, I told him it was fixed.

“Where did you take it?” he asked straightforwardly. Completely innocently.

He wasn’t trying to be mean or snotty. On the contrary, he merely assumed that I must have taken the computer to the Mac repair store. Why? Because he’s heard me make so many self-deprecating remarks about my mechanical (in)abilities — the inner fix-it critic’s barbs, voiced aloud — that he was simply following my lead.

I don’t want that for him. Because I don’t want that to become him. Same goes for our other kids. If I model the quite realistic idea that I can do most anything I set my mind to — and Adrianne and the other adults in our children’s lives do the same — then we’ll raise kids who are able to take on most any challenge.

And are willing to.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.