My parents lied…they said I could be Superman
Your parents, my parents, they all did it. They lied!
Lying was not the intent. Making you feel like you could be anything you wanted to be was the rational. The lie sounded like this …”you can be anything you want to be“.
Great! I wanted to be Superman. Not sure what my mom and dad said about that idea. Not sure when they infomed me that I’d likely never be Superman or that Supeman was not real and I could only select real people to become like. Darn. Ok – I will come up with a real person.

I see how this works now… Ok, I want to be Micky Mantle no wait Roger Maris or maybe Wille Mays. Real people, right. I discovered by around age ten that I was actually afraid of the baseball and could not stand in the batters’ box or catch a fly ball. That thing hurts when it hits you.
Alright then, what’s left? Those were basically my top two ideas. So did your parents tell you that you could be anything you wanted to be? If so, it was untrue. In reality, you can only be what God designed you to be and become.
In his book Pinocchio Parenting author Chuck Borsellino states this very common lie shared by us as parents. You can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard. Even the greatest basketball player of all time could not become a top notch baseball player. Michael Jordan had a life long dream to play major league baseball. It took 2 years to convince him that he could not hit a curve ball. I feel better about my hope of baseball stardom now.
Kids are not just blank sheets of paper, one page like the other. We are not like a piece of copy paper from some mass reproduction in a standardized printer either. Rather you, me, and our children are like individually cut diamonds in the hands of the Master Jewler.
The truth is more like this: You can discover your talents and do the most you can with what you have, to become the best you can, in a way nobody has been before.
Suggestions to go deeper:
Assesmnets- Discover and Develop Your Strengths : Strengths Finder 2.0 Assesmnet and Discover and Help your Child to Discover Their Strengths: StrengthsExplored for Kids.
a good read – learn more about your strengths:
The Truth About You, Now, Discover Your Strengths - Marcus Buckingham
Why You Can’t Be Anything You Want to Be - Arthur Miller
