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Being OK with not being extraordinary

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Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#151

Post by tonymet »

JohnBooty wrote: post #122
tonymet wrote: post #37

It's ok to aspire to mediocrity

I'm not 100% sure you're being literal but I agree with this statement when taken at face value. Being "extraordinary" often means you're just making somebody else richer. There are some objectively extraordinary folks working at e.g. Facebook, but what does that really gain them? What has that given the world? It's a mixed bag, to put it mildly. Probably the only real reason to strive for being "extraordinary" at yo…

I think it's unfair that "mediocre" is seen as a bad word. We have so many things to do, I think it's perfectly good to be mediocre in many ways. We're competing on a global scale, it's impossible to be exceptional on many dimensions.

I'd like to encourage more people to be happy being mediocre.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#152

Post by entropicdrifter »

cpursley wrote: post #101
pizza234 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect Scott Adams for his comic, but his blog is (in my opinion) a bunch of mass-produced rhetoric-pseudo-rational ramblings¹, trading out quality for (a very large) quantity. Scott Adams is definitely not famous because "he is an ok graphic artist and has an ok humor". He's famous because his satire was fairly unique and very sharp. I think he's very talented in the humor department; in addition to his creating…

I'm take a gander that your view about his blog is based on your pre-existing political leanings.

I mean... https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Views_on_science_a...

The guy has a ton of crank views

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#153

Post by Kinrany »

ip26 wrote: post #146
rvn1045 wrote: post #86

The internet has made everyone feel inadequate as it's easy to compare yourself to people you see on the internet. Couple of things to keep in mind if your comparing yourself: 1. There aren't as many uber successful people out there as the internet makes it seem. It's far fewer than you think. Lets take a simple example of dudes who go to the gym and are strong. Instagram makes it seem like all dudes bench press 400…

3. The successful people you are comparing yourself to are often older than you. Who knows if you'll wind up as successful as them, but I'm pretty sure many of them would trade it all just to be young again.

They'd want to keep their knowledge, which you don't have.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#154

Post by pgcj_poster »

If you're a 1 in 100 type, you've likely had feeling that because you're more capable than literally almost everyone, you should be achieving things more like the people you read about in books or online. But unless you've read 80 million biographies, those people are not 1 in a 100. They're more like 1 in million. And once you reach the truly great, like Einstein, then it's 1 in a billion (or more).

You are not 1 in a billion. You may very well be 1 in 100, though. And that's still pretty incredible. Take, for example the author of this article. She might think that she's not extraordinary because she's not an Einstein, or whatever. However, she works somewhere called "the Quantum Matter Institute" -- that's something that 99% of people probably could not accomplish. So honestly I would be surprised if most people who knew her didn't think that she was extraordinary.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#157

Post by tabtab »

IBCNU wrote: post #130
tabtab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of that movie also. Although half fiction, it's a wonderful flick; I highly recommend it for anybody frustrated with their position in life. Re: "The movie portrayed Salieri as a man who could barely play. When that was just not true at all." That was the King, not Salieri, as I remember it. But Salieri's playing did lack the flair that Mozart's had, as shown. However, the King himself seemed to prefer Sali…

If you play music in modern times, this movie is also informative. I think most musicians who really make innovative tunes are aware of these trade offs, it maps to real life well. There's musicians who make music for other musicians and they're trying to say something they know most people will have a little difficulty hearing.

Being Mozart was often in debt, it wouldn't make sense that he wanted to please musicians over paying customers. But who knows. Maybe his desire to test the limits of music subconsciously overrode financial worries, and that's why he was always in debt.

Most creative pioneers have a personality quirk or two.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#158

Post by afpx »

mettamage wrote: post #94
wjossey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my career so far in a nutshell. I’m an average programmer. I’m an excellent problem solver. I have an above average work ethic. I’m an excellent communicator. Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact. Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writ…

How do you do leverage these strengths? I have a somewhat similar profile and I simply feel like a fish judged by its ability to climb a tree. Yet, I: - Help with hiring/marketing/leading scrum sessions (when the actual scrum master is ill) - Conduct pentests - Do the frontend and backend (what I was hired to do) If they'd let me, I'd help with the writing efforts as well as my writing ability is better than that of…

One of my favorite colleagues is just an average developer, but he’s also very funny. He has figured out his niche and excels at it. To leverage strengths, it’s often helpful to understand the team.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#159

Post by nkohari »

Noos wrote: post #53
umvi wrote: post #2

> Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before. I read an article once about how the amount of work to get into the top tier in a single area is astronomical, but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone. For example, becoming a top tier statistician is hard. But becoming a top tier sta…

No, the problem is that what is defined as top tier keeps rising, and raises the bar just to be average. You also now have to compete with a huge cohort of people due to the net now. Going with the videogame focus, if you ever play competitive games you actually see how brutal it can be. In Overwatch for example you have an absolute mountain to climb in ranked because you can't just improve, you have to improve above…

> Essentially the internconnectedness of everything is making it hard to find the niches you speak of. There's always someone who loves his job so much and works at it so much that he defines the meta, so to say. This is a problem in computer science, even.

Then, seek out those people and work with them. Computing is collaborative. It's rather difficult (and unnecessary!) to create anything meaningful entirely by yourself.

Re: Being OK with not being extraordinary

#160

Post by samatman »

unnouinceput wrote: post #99

We all are extraordinary actually. Human race is in a continuous evolution, so absolutely any of us is an extraordinary person compared with 2000 years ago great minds. A high-school student is better educated then Pythagoras for example. Conversely, even the greatest minds of today (Hawking, Einstein, etc) will be below high-school kids of the future.

This is a dangerous point of view to take.

"evolution" means "adaptation". It does not mean "progress".

A doctor of the 18th century would bleed their patients to balance humours, but would, at least, not shove an icepick into their frontal lobe as a form of exorcism. A doctor of the early 20th century wouldn't do the former, but might well do the latter.

Which is not to say that progress doesn't exist, only that it's a fraught concept, with many caveats, regressions, and no firm ground to judge its status at any given point. You will have a more productive engagement with history, and with the ancients, if you consider them as your equals, just situated differently in time and place.

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