Eric Gonzalez-Payne

The bus left before it was properly light and the ride took an hour. I spent most of it lying down.

The tape player had come out of a dumpster, and it had been thrown away for a reason. The sound barely worked. But there was a cassette still inside it, opera, and I had worked out that if I laid the machine flat on the pleather seat and put my head down on top of it, ear against the casing, I could just about hear it. So that is what I did, every morning, curled over a broken tape player in a hand me down jacket with the cold coming up through the window.

I was ten. Nobody assigned it. Nobody knew.

My grandmother taught me to go through the bins. We pulled out furniture, cleaned it up and sold it. Devices too, when they were not broken enough to be worthless. I remember it as one of the great educations of my life rather than as hardship, because of what it actually taught me: broken and worthless are not the same word. Most of the furniture was not broken at all, only unrecognised. The tape player genuinely was broken, and it still gave me an hour of music a day for years, because I was willing to put my head down next to it.

I grew up somewhere that did not produce many successes.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because it is easy to misread and it is the opposite of contempt. I played Mario with these people. I played Halo with them until three in the morning on school nights. I knew their houses, their mothers, the shortcuts they took home. Every one of them had a story worth telling, real adventures, possibilities that belonged to them and to nobody else. Not one was short of ability.

Then I went after something, and most of them did not, and two decades later a great many are in the same rooms playing newer versions of the same games, struggling with the ordinary machinery of adult life in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence.

They were qualified. Every single one of them was qualified.

That is why I became a teacher, and I have never once managed to put it down.

I have spent twenty years asking why, on four continents. The answer is almost never talent. It resolves into three things, and I have watched each of them take someone I knew.

Some never chose. Viktor Frankl called it the existential vacuum: every door technically open and no reason to walk through any of them. He named it in the nineteen fifties, decades before anyone had a phone to blame it on. What makes it worse is that the advice we hand these young people is not merely useless but harmful. Find your passion, we tell them, as though it were an object lying in a field waiting to be come across. Paul O'Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton measured what that belief does. Young people who think passions are discovered abandon a subject the moment it turns difficult, because the difficulty arrives looking like proof they picked the wrong one. Those who think interests are constructed keep going through the same difficulty. Passion is not the raw material. It is the residue.

Some were afraid. Maslow named this late in his life, and better than anyone has managed since. He called it the Jonah complex: the fear of one's own greatness, the quiet evasion of one's own destiny. It is not laziness, and from the outside it does not look like fear. Most people do not fail to become what they might have been. They decline it early, while the declining still costs nothing, and assemble the reasons over the following thirty years.

And some simply never knew the steps. This one attracts the least sympathy and deserves the most, because it is the only one that is purely a supply problem. Albert Bandura spent a career demonstrating that the belief you can affect an outcome is not installed by praise, or encouragement, or being told you are capable. It is built by mastery experience. Doing a real thing badly, then less badly, in front of someone, until the evidence belongs to you and cannot be argued away. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum gave the gap its proper name. There is what a person is permitted to do, and there is what a person is actually able to do, and only the second has ever counted for anything. Two children sit in the same classroom, permitted identical futures. Sometimes only one of them is able, and the difference appears on no form their parents could fill in.

Around the age of eight I became obsessed with books about countries. I read every one within reach. Nobody rewarded me for it, and nobody could have predicted what it was for. Years later, the computers I pulled out of dumpsters went to nonprofits. Years after that, I hitchhiked around the entire world, a full circumnavigation, thirteen months.

Not because I could. Because I chose to, and then did the unremarkable things a choice makes obvious.

The line usually attributed to Henry Ford has followed me since I was a teenager: the man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he cannot are both right. It is not a poster. It is an unnervingly accurate description of how the world sorts people, and I watched it sort the boys I grew up with while we were all still sitting in the same room.

But I want to be precise, because the cheap version of this belief is everywhere and it is a lie. Choosing is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient. Telling a fifteen year old to believe in himself and then walking out of the room is not encouragement, it is abandonment with better manners. The choice has to land on something: an adult who does the work and will answer a question, a project small enough to finish and real enough to matter, a record of what actually happened, so that a year later the young person cannot be talked out of their own history.

Aristotle gave me the word I keep returning to. Eudaimonia, usually rendered as flourishing, though what he meant is closer to the full use of what you already are. He also warned that potential is not a promise. An acorn does not become an oak because it wants to. It becomes one given soil, water, and years during which almost nothing appears to be happening.

In twenty years of teaching I have very rarely met a child short of potential. I have met hundreds short of soil.

And the soil is not money. I need to say that plainly, because money is the comfortable answer and it is wrong. I have taught the children of serious wealth, every lesson paid for, every door already open, and watched them stand in the doorway. And the boys I grew up with had exactly as much money as I did, which was none. What I had was not an amount. It was a grandmother who looked hard at what everyone else walked past, a broken machine I was stubborn about, library books nobody assigned. The soil is the adult, the project, the record, the habit of looking. Almost none of it can be bought off a shelf, which is the whole problem: wealth does not guarantee it, and the lack of wealth does not explain its absence. It has to be built, deliberately, around one particular child at a time. That is what I have spent my life learning how to do.

So this is not a business I fell into. It is the same question I was holding at sixteen with a controller in my hands, wondering why the world was about to sort us so differently when there was so little between us.

My grandmother was right about what people throw away. I have spent twenty years putting my head down next to it.

Everyone should be able to meet their own expectations. Nobody arrives able to do it alone.