3 ms·

The problem with the article is that it only uses examples of extra ordinary people. Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius. Mo

The problem with the article is that it only uses examples of extra ordinary people. Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius. Most people who flunk out or drop out of school do not become billionaires and neither will you. Most people who decide to give it their all and become various forms of artists will never be famous, noticed no wealty or admired (Though on a nano scale you may have people who do) By a large margin most restaurants / startups fail. You are not going to create the next unicorn. yes this is not 100% accurate because it does happen. Much like buying a lotto ticket. People do win. But you will not. (Almost entirely certain but again some do win). People like Lonardo da Vinci are 1 in a billion. Maybe one in 2 billion. People like Jobs and Zuckerberg are a lot more common. There are maybe 1000? 10.000? If we say 100.000 that is about 0.0013% of the world population. You are not in the 0.0013% (2019 estimate) (Though you really need take into account the privilege accorded people based. on where they live, where they were born, family. If you win the lottery and grow up in a wealty educated country, you have a HUGE advantage. Much like buying 1 lottery ticket drastically increases you chance of winning. The point being nearly all people fail to be special. They will not be remembered by the grater society after their death. They will have made no huge impact on the world. They will never make it big. Thus we should not focus our choices in life my making a few of the same choices that are advantageous for 1 in a billion. We should not set our goals to achieve what they did. We should focus on having a nice life, a good set of friends, enough money to live ok, having interesting hobbies Having a job that is ok. A safe and dry place to live. Have some love. We should expect and respect that we will be average That is not a failure. That is what most likely will happen. So set out to make the most of it.

pgustafs 5y ago
I vehemently disagree. Not with your explicit reasoning, but with the implicit assumption that there is some 1-dimensional metric of specialness or greatness that we're all being measured against. The great thing about life is that it's so multidimensional. If you want to be the richest person in the world, of course you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you want to be the best version of yourself, you can easily be the best father-husband-son-coder-blogger-walker-painter to your children+wife+colleagues in your city in July 2021. More than that, you can do things no one else has done. If you like research, the frontier is endless and extremely high dimensional. Find some niche that you enjoy and crush it. If you like helping people, there will never be an end of people you can help. You don't have to be average -- you can be in the 1% of what you're passionate about, easily, because there are so many possible choices of passion.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  You said you disagree, and then you repeated their point with different words.
  - truenindb 5y ago
    I zement to differ!
  - arkano 5y ago
    The comments are similar, but the energy is different. One of them read to me like "go and strive to be great in one of the million directions possible" and the other was "you won't win on any direction more than average, so settle down and live simple".
mikewarot 5y ago
>Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius. Kids have far more curiosity and insight about things, "education" exists to squash those qualities in those outside the donor class.
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
I started working fulltime at 15 (illegally) to pay for my family to have a place to live. I was not able to attend college and I technically can't prove I ever graduated HS. I literally carried buckets of shit as a kid for my family of 7 we were so poor. My parents/family had taken the lions share of my earned money until they died in my early twenties. I am now in the 1% of global earnings, and every step has been truly awful degradation as I have had 0 negotiating leverage and just learned to do what others hate because you get paid more for it. I 100% guarantee that in the age of the internet there are more "self made" millionaire teenagers than at any point in history. And that puts the lie to the core feeling he puts out (which to be fair he does contradict multiple times) that there is less opportunity for agency now than previously, as always the sense of ones own childhood agency is still dependent on the quality/existence of your parents, the personality of the child and family/environmental wealth. This article has a true premise in its title, autonomy and agency do matter very much, but the authors inability to grasp that starting conditions are the sole determining factor for any organisms global boundaries of success/failure are telling and they clearly romanticize the stories of extreme outliers and disregard data for narrative. I 100% agree, this individual is romanticizing things he doesn't understand and the article has a lot of generally poor thinking. Base rate fallacy gets people every time, the idea that opportunities for agency have decreased is absurd. Also he apparently has a big thing for allowing kids to build full on buildings because he brings it up twice... which I don't think has ever been generally acceptable. He should read books like little house on the prairie to get a better idea of how poor childhood opportunity has been throughout history.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  do what others hate because you get paid more for it. So very true. I see top management, up close, spending much of their time handling stupid/obnoxious tasks nobody else wants. I see a friend reap considerable wealth by dealing, literally, in garbage. I see $minwage jobs filled & paid because nobody else wants to. I’d write software for free. It’s the absurd deadlines & requirements I get paid to deliver on. I see the “income inequality” issue as a matter of most people not willing to do - and those who do get paid well.

pgustafs 5y ago

I vehemently disagree. Not with your explicit reasoning, but with the implicit assumption that there is some 1-dimensional metric of specialness or greatness that we're all being measured against. The great thing about life is that it's so multidimensional. If you want to be the richest person in the world, of course you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you want to be the best version of yourself, you can easily be the best father-husband-son-coder-blogger-walker-painter to your children+wife+colleagues in your city in July 2021. More than that, you can do things no one else has done. If you like research, the frontier is endless and extremely high dimensional. Find some niche that you enjoy and crush it. If you like helping people, there will never be an end of people you can help. You don't have to be average -- you can be in the 1% of what you're passionate about, easily, because there are so many possible choices of passion.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
You said you disagree, and then you repeated their point with different words.
- truenindb 5y ago
  I zement to differ!
- arkano 5y ago
  The comments are similar, but the energy is different. One of them read to me like "go and strive to be great in one of the million directions possible" and the other was "you won't win on any direction more than average, so settle down and live simple".

mikewarot 5y ago

>Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius. Kids have far more curiosity and insight about things, "education" exists to squash those qualities in those outside the donor class.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago

I started working fulltime at 15 (illegally) to pay for my family to have a place to live. I was not able to attend college and I technically can't prove I ever graduated HS. I literally carried buckets of shit as a kid for my family of 7 we were so poor. My parents/family had taken the lions share of my earned money until they died in my early twenties. I am now in the 1% of global earnings, and every step has been truly awful degradation as I have had 0 negotiating leverage and just learned to do what others hate because you get paid more for it. I 100% guarantee that in the age of the internet there are more "self made" millionaire teenagers than at any point in history. And that puts the lie to the core feeling he puts out (which to be fair he does contradict multiple times) that there is less opportunity for agency now than previously, as always the sense of ones own childhood agency is still dependent on the quality/existence of your parents, the personality of the child and family/environmental wealth. This article has a true premise in its title, autonomy and agency do matter very much, but the authors inability to grasp that starting conditions are the sole determining factor for any organisms global boundaries of success/failure are telling and they clearly romanticize the stories of extreme outliers and disregard data for narrative. I 100% agree, this individual is romanticizing things he doesn't understand and the article has a lot of generally poor thinking. Base rate fallacy gets people every time, the idea that opportunities for agency have decreased is absurd. Also he apparently has a big thing for allowing kids to build full on buildings because he brings it up twice... which I don't think has ever been generally acceptable. He should read books like little house on the prairie to get a better idea of how poor childhood opportunity has been throughout history.

ctdonath 5y ago
do what others hate because you get paid more for it. So very true. I see top management, up close, spending much of their time handling stupid/obnoxious tasks nobody else wants. I see a friend reap considerable wealth by dealing, literally, in garbage. I see $minwage jobs filled & paid because nobody else wants to. I’d write software for free. It’s the absurd deadlines & requirements I get paid to deliver on. I see the “income inequality” issue as a matter of most people not willing to do - and those who do get paid well.