6 ms·

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the g

by nicbou 2y ago

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my motorcycle super far, but wherever I went, there was a greater badass riding along. Some of these travellers were on much longer journeys, on much smaller budgets, on a much worse bikes, riding offroad all the way, camping every night. Some were on bicycles, going around the world under their own power. I was just a rich tourist with a great bike who slept in hotels. In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport.

netsharc 2y ago
But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel unworthy.". I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.
- xattt 2y ago
  Not OP, but I will feel an internal sense of frustration at the cards I’ve been dealt with. Edit: To add, the frustration is projected onto the other person, given they are a physical manifestation of what you are not.
- vasco 2y ago
  Everyone has it, it's part of the ego which is part of being human.
- nicbou 2y ago
  I identify by the things I love and excel at. If being an artist is a big chunk of who you are, it can hurt your ego to meet q much better artist who is also good at many other things. Imagine playing the bongos, and you meet some guy who plays it really well… and it’s Richard Feynman.
  - stavros 2y ago
    The reason why I can't relate to this much is that I play the bongos not to be the best bongo player, but because I like playing the bongos. I know that, for some people, the motivator is "being admired at X", but that's not what drives me, I usually just like doing X. Sometimes, I get good at it. Other times (like with tennis), I keep sucking, but I still like the process.
  - EricMausler 2y ago
    I cant help but chime in here because I used to feel this way and all the typical advice never felt right (ie that you shouldn't care how good you are at things) Very quickly I will list the 3 main points that have helped me the most 1) the things you care to try to excel at is a statement about things worth excelling at and actual skill is often a minor detail. It's okay to identify with where the effort goes and how much you give rather than the result of it. In this way it is like voting, and there is no best person at voting. You identify with the tribe, not your ability 2) when being competitive does actually matter, the best in the world cannot be everywhere at once, so there is actually a lot of meaning behind being the best locally at something. Or even just not the worst locally. Identity is irrelevant on this one, but it does require you care and are self aware about how good you actually are at things. 3) how you relate to others is also a big part of identity. being in the middle of the pack on most things makes you much more relatable than being best. For some person who is better than you at everything, are you able to deeply connect with them or do you get distracted by comparison thoughts, insecurity, or ideas to use them for something self-serving? If not you, still how often in their life do you think that happens for them with others?
massysett 2y ago
> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. This is a beautiful thing. I watch the teachers in my kids' schools and they do a great job and I think "that's why they're teachers and I'm a lawyer." I watch a great play and I think "that's why they're actors and I'm a lawyer." I hope I'm as good at my work as they are at theirs. But I can't excel at what they do. I don't have time.
- mindwok 2y ago
  OP isn't saying the person they were referring to is a world-class figure in everything (or even two things), just that they seemed to be producing better results in the categories OP cared about, which is very achievable.
- brrrrrm 2y ago
  I’ve definitely met people whose stats are juiced. Probably not as good at scrolling tiktok as me tho
  - wruza 2y ago
    Then you see their feed one time and cry cause there’s no way to copy it to your account.
    - eru 2y ago
      I seem to get way more interesting (and weird..) ads from Google than most of the people I know. But maybe that's just because Google gives me things I find interesting? It's stuff like a three story tall Diesel engine for a container ship. I'm not really in the market for that, but I would totally want to be someone who's casually in the market for that.
- mablopoule 2y ago
jnsie 2y ago
> In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport. Beautiful!
medymed 2y ago
I wonder if super-people like this balance their various activities so that doing each charges them up for some of the others, and then they can hit a resonance like state of being in-the-zone excelling at each one in turn. And not letting small interruptions derail the system. It would be the opposite of being stuck in a soul-sucking rut between unsatisfying work and unsatisfying non-work life.
- stavros 2y ago
  They probably just like doing them.
  - schneems 2y ago
    It took me awhile to realize that some people can simply talk a really good game. They will genuinely pick up a little bit of a skill but can speak about it as if they’ve spent every waking moment thinking about nothing else. I had that realization when an amazing-guy-“ at-everything said something at 100% confidence and 100% charisma that was quite wrong. On the flip side, maybe we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the things we know. The above comment was a topic I didn’t consider myself an expert in, but in hindsite I’ve spent many hours/days on the subject and am quite interested in it. So maybe it’s not that I knew less but rather I lacked the ability to demonstrate that knowledge. (Which is its own, admirable skill).
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Being great only matters if you need external validation. I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. All of the suffering people impose on themselves, on their children, on their society, to be great and envied is wasted. Be successful as a means to be happy and have excess to share with others.
- wruza 2y ago
  This idea doesn’t come early, you have to die few times to get it. I guess that’s how human works, hardwired.
  - vasco 2y ago
    Or read Siddhartha, I guess.
- eru 2y ago
  Eh, some (friendly) competition is fine. Some people enjoy competing and it's (part of) their idea of a good time. If you don't want to compete, that's also fine.
- changexd 2y ago
  >> I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. Thank you for this, I'm currently getting stuck seeing many people here developing their kickass project and feel like if I am not doing this kind of thing in my free time, I am not a valid engineer, this kind of pressure slowly eats out my passion, perhaps it's okay that I don't feel like doing this at them moment, I still love my job and technology, I just want to do something else in my free time that's all.
- brazzy 2y ago
  > Being great only matters if you need external validation. Humans are social creatures. Seeking external validation is, to a certain degree, normal and healthy.
  - 2y ago
nlh 2y ago
The Internet did this to me for a lot of things -- when I was an island, I used to think I was really good at a lot of things: Table tennis, Tetris, some other video games. And relative to my friends and sometimes even the people a few circles away from them, I was! And then, The Internet. And I discovered that I am absolutely NOT good at table tennis. I am not even CLOSE to good at Tetris. And I am TERRIBLE at every video game. Oh well -- so much for competition! Time to enjoy ;)
- kaba0 2y ago
  That’s a good life philosophy! I think it’s also humbling to look at these opportunities as a learning experience. “If you are a smartest person in the room, you are in a wrong room!”
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Step 1 is to realize you're almost certainly not going to be the best in all of spacetime at a thing. Step 2 is to realize you don't have to be - you can just be the best in a given bubble, centered on the here and now. Step 3 is getting comfortable realizing you get to choose the size of that bubble, any time you want!
  - timacles 2y ago
    The real step 1 is not trying to be good at anything and just doing it for the enjoyment Attachment to outcome is very real and hold a lot of people back For example I started getting really good at chess when I stopped caring how many rating points I lost or won today and completely forgot about ratings altogether
- otherme123 2y ago
  > Oh well -- so much for competition! Time to enjoy ;) Some people reacts like this. And some react by doubling down and doing whatever it takes (even cheating, lying and harming competitors) to win. When I played soccer in a local league I meet a worrying amount of people that thought that dangerously kicking a better oponent, for example tackling to the knee, was perfectly reasonable. Elbowing someone in the face was OK it the referee didn't get you. My coach once warned me that I didn't have a proper rate of yellow cards for my playing position, so I should play harder for the sake of it. I fed up and left the sport at 23-25 y.o. A lot of people is unable of competing with themselves ("I want to do X better than myself from the past year, so I need to practice"), and as long as they don't know about someone who is better they don't care to get better at something.
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
I met someone similar in a previous company, but was way more objectionable than your college buddy. Some ex-Google DevOps bozo who just made it his life to snipe at other people's code and projects and undermine them whenever possible. I was talking to someone this bozo just called out in a very public forum, and asked why he wasn't furious and the response was more enlightening than anything - "That's all he's got", which was true - the DevOps bozo had absolutely no other life outside his small corner of tech and needed constant reassurance of their own superiority through publicly critizing others work. In the end, folks just ended up ignoring whatever this person said - talking it with a grain of salt.
thih9 2y ago
> by every conceivable metric No, by every metric that you could conceive at that time. Perhaps someone was looking at you and admiring something that you did that you didn’t notice.
eru 2y ago
I met people like that. I had the pleasure of later overtaking some of them in terms of (some) achievements. Now I'm sometimes on the other side. At least I talked with some friends that confided that impression they had of me. It feels weird. (Especially because I am also very aware of areas where I absolutely suck. But they just hadn't come up with those friends or co-workers before.)
wantsanagent 2y ago
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach. Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
TrackerFF 2y ago
Oh yeah, very much the same. I'd been interested coding and electronics since I was a young teen, and was very much the guy that everyone approached for such problems - it's easy to get cocky like that. In our first year we had a guy that transferred from econ (to electrical engineering). He had to take night classes to catch up with the math and physics, as he didn't take the required AP classes in HS. Anyway, the guy was just a machine. He worked incredibly hard - studied 12 hours a day all week, on top of working in the weekends. The guy picked up everything so fast. Got straight A's, and advanced much faster than the rest of us. We did have some informal internal competition, but this guy was just way up there - no one bothered. He went on to get a Ph.D. in AI/ML, and got a great FAANG job. But, there's never a guarantee. I've met similar people - just straight up rock stars, that for whatever reason didn't reach the stars. I can't help but to think "What a shame, talk about wasted talent" - but who am I to judge, they could be perfectly content with life. Anyway, college is definitely a good place to meet people that are smarter than yourself. If you're the smartest around, you're likely not studying at the right place.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
michaelcampbell 2y ago
> I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport. Dunno if this is a famous quote or one of your own, but I've put it in my list of things to remind myself of periodically. Thanks.

by nicbou 2y ago

netsharc 2y ago

But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel unworthy.". I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.

xattt 2y ago
Not OP, but I will feel an internal sense of frustration at the cards I’ve been dealt with. Edit: To add, the frustration is projected onto the other person, given they are a physical manifestation of what you are not.
vasco 2y ago
Everyone has it, it's part of the ego which is part of being human.
nicbou 2y ago
I identify by the things I love and excel at. If being an artist is a big chunk of who you are, it can hurt your ego to meet q much better artist who is also good at many other things. Imagine playing the bongos, and you meet some guy who plays it really well… and it’s Richard Feynman.
- stavros 2y ago
  The reason why I can't relate to this much is that I play the bongos not to be the best bongo player, but because I like playing the bongos. I know that, for some people, the motivator is "being admired at X", but that's not what drives me, I usually just like doing X. Sometimes, I get good at it. Other times (like with tennis), I keep sucking, but I still like the process.
- EricMausler 2y ago
  I cant help but chime in here because I used to feel this way and all the typical advice never felt right (ie that you shouldn't care how good you are at things) Very quickly I will list the 3 main points that have helped me the most 1) the things you care to try to excel at is a statement about things worth excelling at and actual skill is often a minor detail. It's okay to identify with where the effort goes and how much you give rather than the result of it. In this way it is like voting, and there is no best person at voting. You identify with the tribe, not your ability 2) when being competitive does actually matter, the best in the world cannot be everywhere at once, so there is actually a lot of meaning behind being the best locally at something. Or even just not the worst locally. Identity is irrelevant on this one, but it does require you care and are self aware about how good you actually are at things. 3) how you relate to others is also a big part of identity. being in the middle of the pack on most things makes you much more relatable than being best. For some person who is better than you at everything, are you able to deeply connect with them or do you get distracted by comparison thoughts, insecurity, or ideas to use them for something self-serving? If not you, still how often in their life do you think that happens for them with others?

massysett 2y ago

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. This is a beautiful thing. I watch the teachers in my kids' schools and they do a great job and I think "that's why they're teachers and I'm a lawyer." I watch a great play and I think "that's why they're actors and I'm a lawyer." I hope I'm as good at my work as they are at theirs. But I can't excel at what they do. I don't have time.

mindwok 2y ago
OP isn't saying the person they were referring to is a world-class figure in everything (or even two things), just that they seemed to be producing better results in the categories OP cared about, which is very achievable.
brrrrrm 2y ago
I’ve definitely met people whose stats are juiced. Probably not as good at scrolling tiktok as me tho
- wruza 2y ago
  Then you see their feed one time and cry cause there’s no way to copy it to your account.
  - eru 2y ago
    I seem to get way more interesting (and weird..) ads from Google than most of the people I know. But maybe that's just because Google gives me things I find interesting? It's stuff like a three story tall Diesel engine for a container ship. I'm not really in the market for that, but I would totally want to be someone who's casually in the market for that.
mablopoule 2y ago

jnsie 2y ago

> In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport. Beautiful!

medymed 2y ago

I wonder if super-people like this balance their various activities so that doing each charges them up for some of the others, and then they can hit a resonance like state of being in-the-zone excelling at each one in turn. And not letting small interruptions derail the system. It would be the opposite of being stuck in a soul-sucking rut between unsatisfying work and unsatisfying non-work life.

stavros 2y ago
They probably just like doing them.
- schneems 2y ago
  It took me awhile to realize that some people can simply talk a really good game. They will genuinely pick up a little bit of a skill but can speak about it as if they’ve spent every waking moment thinking about nothing else. I had that realization when an amazing-guy-“ at-everything said something at 100% confidence and 100% charisma that was quite wrong. On the flip side, maybe we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the things we know. The above comment was a topic I didn’t consider myself an expert in, but in hindsite I’ve spent many hours/days on the subject and am quite interested in it. So maybe it’s not that I knew less but rather I lacked the ability to demonstrate that knowledge. (Which is its own, admirable skill).

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

Being great only matters if you need external validation. I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. All of the suffering people impose on themselves, on their children, on their society, to be great and envied is wasted. Be successful as a means to be happy and have excess to share with others.

wruza 2y ago
This idea doesn’t come early, you have to die few times to get it. I guess that’s how human works, hardwired.
- vasco 2y ago
  Or read Siddhartha, I guess.
eru 2y ago
Eh, some (friendly) competition is fine. Some people enjoy competing and it's (part of) their idea of a good time. If you don't want to compete, that's also fine.
changexd 2y ago
>> I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. Thank you for this, I'm currently getting stuck seeing many people here developing their kickass project and feel like if I am not doing this kind of thing in my free time, I am not a valid engineer, this kind of pressure slowly eats out my passion, perhaps it's okay that I don't feel like doing this at them moment, I still love my job and technology, I just want to do something else in my free time that's all.
brazzy 2y ago
> Being great only matters if you need external validation. Humans are social creatures. Seeking external validation is, to a certain degree, normal and healthy.
- 2y ago

nlh 2y ago

The Internet did this to me for a lot of things -- when I was an island, I used to think I was really good at a lot of things: Table tennis, Tetris, some other video games. And relative to my friends and sometimes even the people a few circles away from them, I was! And then, The Internet. And I discovered that I am absolutely NOT good at table tennis. I am not even CLOSE to good at Tetris. And I am TERRIBLE at every video game. Oh well -- so much for competition! Time to enjoy ;)

kaba0 2y ago
That’s a good life philosophy! I think it’s also humbling to look at these opportunities as a learning experience. “If you are a smartest person in the room, you are in a wrong room!”
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
Step 1 is to realize you're almost certainly not going to be the best in all of spacetime at a thing. Step 2 is to realize you don't have to be - you can just be the best in a given bubble, centered on the here and now. Step 3 is getting comfortable realizing you get to choose the size of that bubble, any time you want!
- timacles 2y ago
  The real step 1 is not trying to be good at anything and just doing it for the enjoyment Attachment to outcome is very real and hold a lot of people back For example I started getting really good at chess when I stopped caring how many rating points I lost or won today and completely forgot about ratings altogether
otherme123 2y ago
> Oh well -- so much for competition! Time to enjoy ;) Some people reacts like this. And some react by doubling down and doing whatever it takes (even cheating, lying and harming competitors) to win. When I played soccer in a local league I meet a worrying amount of people that thought that dangerously kicking a better oponent, for example tackling to the knee, was perfectly reasonable. Elbowing someone in the face was OK it the referee didn't get you. My coach once warned me that I didn't have a proper rate of yellow cards for my playing position, so I should play harder for the sake of it. I fed up and left the sport at 23-25 y.o. A lot of people is unable of competing with themselves ("I want to do X better than myself from the past year, so I need to practice"), and as long as they don't know about someone who is better they don't care to get better at something.

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

I met someone similar in a previous company, but was way more objectionable than your college buddy. Some ex-Google DevOps bozo who just made it his life to snipe at other people's code and projects and undermine them whenever possible. I was talking to someone this bozo just called out in a very public forum, and asked why he wasn't furious and the response was more enlightening than anything - "That's all he's got", which was true - the DevOps bozo had absolutely no other life outside his small corner of tech and needed constant reassurance of their own superiority through publicly critizing others work. In the end, folks just ended up ignoring whatever this person said - talking it with a grain of salt.

thih9 2y ago

> by every conceivable metric No, by every metric that you could conceive at that time. Perhaps someone was looking at you and admiring something that you did that you didn’t notice.

eru 2y ago

I met people like that. I had the pleasure of later overtaking some of them in terms of (some) achievements. Now I'm sometimes on the other side. At least I talked with some friends that confided that impression they had of me. It feels weird. (Especially because I am also very aware of areas where I absolutely suck. But they just hadn't come up with those friends or co-workers before.)

wantsanagent 2y ago

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach. Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

TrackerFF 2y ago

Oh yeah, very much the same. I'd been interested coding and electronics since I was a young teen, and was very much the guy that everyone approached for such problems - it's easy to get cocky like that. In our first year we had a guy that transferred from econ (to electrical engineering). He had to take night classes to catch up with the math and physics, as he didn't take the required AP classes in HS. Anyway, the guy was just a machine. He worked incredibly hard - studied 12 hours a day all week, on top of working in the weekends. The guy picked up everything so fast. Got straight A's, and advanced much faster than the rest of us. We did have some informal internal competition, but this guy was just way up there - no one bothered. He went on to get a Ph.D. in AI/ML, and got a great FAANG job. But, there's never a guarantee. I've met similar people - just straight up rock stars, that for whatever reason didn't reach the stars. I can't help but to think "What a shame, talk about wasted talent" - but who am I to judge, they could be perfectly content with life. Anyway, college is definitely a good place to meet people that are smarter than yourself. If you're the smartest around, you're likely not studying at the right place.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

michaelcampbell 2y ago

> I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport. Dunno if this is a famous quote or one of your own, but I've put it in my list of things to remind myself of periodically. Thanks.