I tell young people that there is a curve to life and you must stay ahead of the curve. When we are young boys, just when we decide girls are "yucky" and we think we understand them, suddenly they aren't yucky anymore and we have to learn a whole new set of social skills. Right at the point we become comfortable with our own bodies we start sprouting hair in weird places, we start to stink and have to deal with shaving, deodorants, etc. We finally settle on a hairstyle that is just right for us and our hair starts falling out or turning grey. We think at some point that we understand love just to find that well, love hurts.
We spend years in schools just to find out when we graduate that the learning has just begun. A surgeon can spend thirty years perfecting their craft only to find their hands have begun to shake. We learn physical skills like baseball, football, racing, whatever and just when we get really good at it our joints begin to hurt, our eyesight fails. We become educated men and women, earn doctorates, become experts in our respective fields and just when we begin to feel we are experts, that we have a handle on life our memory, our cognitive function begins to fail.
I do not mention any ages, no numbers because it happens at different times for different people. There are octogenarian iron-man competitors and teenagers going grey at the temples. There are as many Kindergarten prodigies as there are middle-aged fools.
There is a curve to life, stay ahead of it. Learn to dance as a young child, learn to play an instrument, to read music. Choose your first career in first grade or even Kindergarten and work toward that, if you do not know by the time you finish elementary school what you want to be after high-school then you are already behind the curve. You are probably not going to have a single, life-long career, more like three or four careers and you need to be prepared for that.
It is up to parents to make their children aware of this at a very, very young age and to encourage their children to excel, not just in reading, writing and 'rithmetic but also in sport, music, art and whatever else their children show a talent for, or even an interest in.
When Tiger Woods was a two year old toddler, his father put a putter into his hands, evaluated his talent and began training him to be one of the world's great golfers. The world's great musicians, the best Olympic gymnasts start training at home while they are still in Kindergarten. "Though the day be long, life is short". Don't ever tell your kids "There is plenty of time for you to decide". There isn't.
