You Get What You Get & You Don’t Get Upset
In my 20's I worked for a time as a preschool teaching assistant. I loved those crumb-grabbers. For better or worse, they were all Primitive Brain and unfettered by adult social expectations. One moment they might blurt out, ‘Miss Katie, I love you so much,’ and then in the next tell me about a booger hanging out of my nose.
That absence of a filter would also show up when it came time to hand out something to the kids. Whether it was crayons or cookies, invariably somebody would complain that he got the worst version of whatever was being distributed and cry that he needed a new one. Who can blame them? To have the best chance of survival, you need the best resources. But in the world outside the preschool classroom, you can’t always count on having the perfect circumstances.
Part of our job in teaching these kids was how to get along in a world where everyone is trying to survive, and in which life will not always make the best resources or circumstances available to you. So to fend off the crisis of getting a blue crayon when you NEED a yellow one, we employed the mantra, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset,” and then showed them how they can use the yellow crayon to create a picture that might have been different from the one you expected to draw, but ended up being just as beautiful or better.
This reminder to stop wishing for a different circumstance and start making the most of what is in front of you. Words that apply as much to a toddler as they do to you and me today. I have a coaching client who is a singer/songwriter who aspires to work alongside the likes of Noah Kahan. She is out there writing her music, singing her songs, and sharing it all with as many people as she can. She’s not quite on Kahan’s radar yet, but recently (and for no reason in particular) she decided to post some content where she accompanied herself on mandollin rather than her usual guitar. Among her viewers was the musician Henrik. Long story short, she leaves in a week for a US tour as his mandolin player. He might not be Noah Kahan (yet), but he’s definitely a step in the right direction.
What if she had said, “Gosh, thanks, but I really am not that proficient at mandolin and you’re not Noah Kahan.” Mind you, at the time, both things were true! She could have used toddler logic and passed over that opportunity completely. Instead, she considered her goals, let go of the idea of what she thought progress would look like, and said YES (and then crash-coursed herself in mandolin). Now she is touring the country as a paid musician. Not only is she already fulfilling her goals at a level, but she is most definitely going to unlock more opportunity that she can’t even predict.