Paul Graham has a great essay right now titled How to do what you love. There’s a bit two-thirds down which says the following:
if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." When people say something like this, it's more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. "
When I started writing “The 23rd Letter”, there were some people who were absolutely floored by the idea that I’d even started writing. By the time the third book was out, they’d dispelled their disbelief and some had even been inspired to start writing.
My son is a big fan of “Bob the Builder”. The kid is barely old enough to talk but he can sing along to the theme tune. I like kids TV series like “Bob the Builder” and “Thomas the Tank Engine” which promote such positive thinking. The theme in Bob is always “Can we do it? Yes we can!” and the trains in Thomas are really concerned about being “useful”.
Is this a bad thing? I don’t think we’re indoctrinating our children into bad habits. I want my kids to look out in the morning and wonder what great thing they are going to do that day. If my daughter wants to go to the Sorbonne, no problem. If she wants to go to Berkeley, fantastic! If she wants to study Byzantine Studies at our local university, brilliant. And if she wants to just sit at home and raise her children I’ll be the proudest granddad in the world.
As long as she never thinks she can’t do something and as long as she is happy.