Learning to Accept No

I have been discussing an article about a gifted child with my brother-in-law.  Now, I'm not sure what my opinion on the article in question is, since I believe that we really need more information about why the professor is denying the kid the class.  There may be reasons we're not being told.  However, on the surface, I am in support of this kid being able to take the class in question.  Of course, my brother-in-law disagrees with me.  That's no surprise, we usually disagree.  I'm okay with that.  If I agreed with everyone on everything, life would be very boring.

However, my brother-in-law said something that I had read in the comments of the article which, on its surface, seems like a good idea.  He said that the child needs to learn to take no for an answer.  For some reason, this really bugged me.  Since I am one of those people who expects immediate obedience from my children, I could not figure out why this bothered me.  After all, I expect my children to accept no for an answer.  Why shouldn't this kid accept no for an answer?

After mulling this over for a bit, I gave my brain free reign, while I played video games.  Suddenly, it hit me.  We live in a country where everyone is encouraged to go after what they want, and so long as it is moral, ethical and legal, there is no reason for them to not reach for it.  Yet, we're frequently told to accept no, or accept that our instincts are not as good as some other person's.

Where, then, do the achievers come from?  Do you think they're taking no for an answer?  How many books do you know of that are written specifically for the purpose of getting past no?  In fact, there's even a book specifically titled Getting Past No.  We spend all of our children's formative years telling them they have to learn to accept no for an answer, then we try to get them to stop accepting no.  What a conundrum.