This is a “thanks I’m cured” statement, no different from saying depressed people should smile more.
Put down the internet drama machine and go do small good things in the real world.
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> considered subhuman by the rest of society!
Unless you are literally an AI, then as a member of society I can tell you that this is factually inaccurate. I think you are a human.
I also know that there is a tiny fraction of society that consider me subhuman. HP Lovecraft would be horrified by my very existence. The fraction of society that calls people subhuman is really bad at maintaining healthy relationships and so they don’t tend to hold onto power so I don’t care about them.
> just terrible at everything and have accomplished nothing
Do you have solid evidence that this is factually accurate, or does it only feel true?
If it feels true, then get up and go for a walk or roll outside, occasionally doing pushups or waving your arms about. That will help you see reality more clearly.
Also, teach yourself how to make scrambled eggs well. That way when you remember the parts of your life that do suck, you’ll at least be able to remind yourself of your ability to make scrambled eggs for someone.
What happens if you don't? What do you tell someone who managed to find something at which they are respectably competent, but not the best? Is that not sufficient?
That does not mean that a given person should not try to get better, because this is the only way you will start getting to a level of competency and maybe, with some additional luck and push, to a top performer level. Not everyone can be number one, but extraordinary ( the attached article ) definition allows for that. And being second best at 'whatever' sure beats just complaining about everything you did not get a chance to accomplish.
<< Is that not sufficient?
I honestly don't know. It is a very personal question each of us should answer internally. I, personally, want to do better and you do want to keep giving yourself progressively harder goals. I am currently working on a plan for 23-25 and I am getting kinda excited, because I believe it will move me to a better place in terms of my career ( and by extension better family life ) and interests, but I know it will require some buckling down and really polishing some skills. Maybe it is spending too much time on HN watching other people's 'Show HN' threads that got me to question myself "Why can't I do this?/"What is missing?"
I already know I can't be best. As mentioned in the very fist paragraph I do not believe it is even possible, but I still think there is a lot of untapped potential. Wasting it would be a shame.
edit: also probably untrue, I bet there are lots of songwriters who could make songs about your life that the vast majority of people would agree are better than yours
Whose decision is it that the other songwriters are better at expressing this one dude’s experiences? Thats not an objective question. It is a choice.
Writing is hard, and there are very good reasons people work with experts to make things about themselves.
Related, have you ever seen this clip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Y6zimxi-Q
Upon reflection, I think you are right.
> writing is hard
Oh definitely. I’ve certainly had the experience of Lin-Manuel Miranda expressing something more clearly than I can.
It would have been sometime in the late 2000s and I was visiting dear old dad in Christchurch, NZ, and my buddy James, aka Lawrence Arabia was playing a gig at the Wonderbar in nearby Littleton on Christmas Eve. I happened to meet a nice young lady, shit you not, named Eve, and we ended back at her place… her parent’s place. At 2am on Christmas Eve. Then her dad comes down and finds us fooling around on the couch in front of the tree. My ride had left hours ago so I had to call up pops. Surprisingly he was very pleased with my escapades and not too bothered with the wake up call.
Here’s James’s take on the event: https://fabulousarabia.bandcamp.com/track/give-me-love-tonig...
While it’s a fine song, it is definitely not his best, and I’m sure he’d admit that it is not as good as my better ones!
It is, however, better than my song about that night: https://williamcotton.bandcamp.com/track/eve-of-eve
My wife and I, complete strangers beforehand, were two of maybe 15 people who went to see James play at a small bar in SF about ten years ago. That dude has been getting me laid for decades!
Anyways, unless I happen to steal a steam engine high on cocaine or some other act of epic folklore there’s no chance in hell that some songwriter out there is ever going to write a better song about my life than yours truly.
If it somehow happened it would be an amazing honor.
Let's follow the thread here. We have an article about learning to be OK with not being extraordinary. We have a comment about the article stating that you can be the best at something, you just need to find your niche. Then we have someone who says it's wrong to lie to people about being able to find a niche. Then I point out that for something like songwriting there is indeed a niche if you're writing about things that are personal. Then this person calls that a coping mechanism and says:
I bet there are lots of songwriters who could make songs about your life that the vast majority of people would agree are better than yours
Well, funny enough, I do know a very talented and accomplished songwriter and he happened to write a song about a memorable night. I happened to write a song about that same memorable night. It's a good enough story that it inspired two songs to be written, professionally recorded, mixed, mastered, and put onto albums with artwork and all of that hoopla and I'm not skittish about retelling a brief synopsis. Tragically, I say that James' song is actually better than my song about the event!
The only song that James has ever written about me is something that triggers your insecurities. Normal adults can indeed mention topical memorable nights like this in casual conversation. Normal adults can joke about "getting laid"... with their wife. Do you get why I added the part about my wife? We literally met at one of James' concerts.
Can you now see the poetry in all of this?
This implies there are at least 8 billion “things to be good at” which I don’t think is necessarily true. I suspect most people are not the best at anything.
At a slightly less extreme level, it's always possible to find something niche enough that is just so obscure that you can become the best by persistence alone. Maybe you're the world expert on blue umbrellas manufactured in 1993.
(to be fair, there is also inner satisfaction coming from deep understanding and mastering of some activity, but alone it's rarely enough without any external validation to motivate people)
That sounds intuitively true, but it's not.
I thought the same thing, until I met an actual board game genius who beat me at every single game we played that I invented and practiced before playing against him.
That's why he makes a pretty good living creating and selling board games and I don't.
People with talents do exist, unless board games is your thing, it won't work.
this is a good thing.
again, this is a good thing, they’re happy.
And the person you were talking to didn't even say they were happy! They just said they're the best at some combination of things. Even assuming they are happy, they're probably not near the top of the happiness charts. "best at making yourself happy" looks to me like a completely unfounded guess/hope.
Top 10% doesn't necessarily make me "extraordinary", depending on how you define it. It's enough for it to be part of my something, though.
But okay, let's say 95th percentile to make it more achievable. Well, a normal person can reach 95th percentile in several things, but that's out of a list of hundreds of things or more. Being 95th percentile in most things is not going to happen, let alone all things.
On the whole though, the entire concept of “best” is a mess in a world of eight billion. At this point it’s more up to the whims of the contest, and doesn’t seem very correlated with life outcomes. Better by far to be one of the best, working shoulder to shoulder with the others, and forget entirely about who holds the podium.