When I was in high school, I was a guitar teacher. I was probably a terrible guitar teacher, but it wasn’t a job I wanted, it was a job I kind of couldn’t get out of. I had only one student, the son of a very nice teacher at my high school. After school in the drafting classroom, my student and I would listen to music he liked and try to transcribe it and learn how to play it.

Several times he asked me a question as we puzzled through a guitar solo: “There’s no way I’m ever going to be as good as Jimmi Hendrix, so why should I even bother playing at all?” I answered: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters that it’s yours. It matters that you did it, and it reflect what you as a person were feeling at the time.”

Maybe you can’t be as good at guitar as Jimmi Hendrix was, but you can be your best self at whatever you put yourself to: poetry, songwriting, fiction, musicianship, business, charity. The list goes on.