Talents

"Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best."
Henry Van Dyke

Have you ever felt like "I am good at this but Joe is even better. There's no way I can compete with him so I won't even try. I will have to find something else that nobody can do better than me". Unfortunately it is really difficult to find a talent you possess that nobody can do better than you. There will always be greater people than yourself at any particular talent at a given time. The only way you can become the best at something is to spend years perfecting your talent, consistently working on improving it every single day in any way you can. You have to dedicate your whole life to something if you want to be the best.

But just because you aren't willing to put in all the hours and dedicate your life to becoming the best guitar player ever doesn't mean that you should give up on playing the guitar. What counts is that you really enjoy playing the guitar in your spare time and the people around you really enjoy listening to it. It's perfectly okay just to be good instead of great. People will still appreciate the fact that you can play the guitar better than they can (and that they don't have to pay a fortune to listen an expert when they probably don't know enough about playing the guitar to appreciate the difference anyway), and feed on the joy you get from playing it.

Use what talents you possess. The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. There can only be a very few people who are the best at what they do. If everyone else stopped working (or playing) because they weren't as good, our society would fall apart. We can't all be the best. Sometimes our life situation doesn't allow us to focus on developing our talents to that great a degree. But we can still enjoy developing them to whatever degree we can, and other people can still benefit from them even if they aren't so polished. Don't compare yourself with others and find yourself wanting. Just celebrate whatever talents you have to the degree that you can comfortably do that. We are all eager to see what you can do, even if someone else can do it better.