Know that you can, believe that you can, and know with ALL of your heart that you will. You will succeed in spite of any obstacles that my try to hinder you!
When I was a teenager, my favorite word was “can’t. I can’t dance. I can’t do this homework. I would usually do these things anyway, but only after first saying that I couldn’t.
The summer after I turned fourteen, I was in Spokane for my annual three-week visit with my father and he got to hear my constant “can’t” mantra firsthand. As he often did on my yearly visit, he took me to sit in on the marketing class he was teaching at the local community college. I was getting ready to tune him out and tune into my book when one of his students said “I can’t understand” in reference to something in the curriculum.
My dad stood up at the front of the room and said, “No!” It seemed out of character for a laid-back Southern guy, but there he was going off on the word “can’t.”
“Can’t has no business in the classroom.” It’s bad enough I get it from her, but she’s young yet and hasn’t figured out that ‘can’t’ is the worst four-letter word in the English language.”
His students just stared at him for a minute, and I put down my book. My dad’s tangents were the stuff of legend in my life and always funny, but that’s why companies paid him to come in and motivate their employees for a couple of hours. He had a great stage presence and a knack for making things understandable. I think his classes were probably pretty interesting for his students.
With everyone’s eyes on him, he started pacing the front of the classroom, turning off the projector and changing the day’s lesson plan. “Four-letter words are impolite in mixed company — and my daughter is sitting there — but we all know what those words are. A few four-letter words get thrown around like they aren’t offensive, and chief among them, is ‘can’t.’. If you’re going to stand there and tell me you can’t, you’ve already failed. You’ve already convinced yourself that you can’t, and nothing I say or do is going to convince you otherwise.”
“Your homework — and yours, too, daughter dear — is to go home and find yourself a can. Get one of those big markers and write the words “Can Can” on it. Every time you say you can’t this week, I want you to write down what you can’t do and put in the Can Can. At the end of the week, go through them and see how many opportunities you missed because you think you can’t. Turn each of those ‘cant’s’ into a ‘can’ and see how much you can achieve.”
When we got back to his house after class and dinner at my favorite restaurant, he actually made me make my own Can Can. All the things in my Can Can were things I actually could do, I just didn’t want to put in the effort.
As a kid his Can Can made me roll my eyes, but as an adult I think he was pretty on point. Twenty-five years later, going through his things after he passed, I found the printouts he’d made for his class for several years after that first one. Joe’s Can Can became a regular lesson in his classes, and the point was that there are enough obstacles in life without becoming one for yourself. Now my children are petulant teenagers with great affection for the word ‘can’t’ and I’m seriously considering having them make their own Can Can.
My dad was the ultimate can man. He never met a “can’t” he couldn’t turn into a “can.”
