Not sure at which part I nodded hardest. Dumbing down for social approval began at 9 years old, became a lifelong habit and remains my biggest mistake. If only I knew then how the bullying and popularity contests wont last but the underachieving will. Looking forward to the full comeback of that precocious little girl this 2015 :) School: Did it bore me? Yes, to the nth degree. Its torture. Like putting Michael Jordan in basketball camp with me. I think faster and formulate thoughts whole. I hear new ideas and am able in a matter of hours or days of immersion not only to understand but to explain them to others. Almost everything I learned, I learned myself. If Im interested in something, I learn it. But if I sit on my ass, that wont make any difference, will it? Friends: Choose your friends wisely, seek challenges and dont be shy. If you try simply to fit in and to dumb yourself down, then you will have sentenced yourself to solitary confinement. Love: Youre smart. Very smart. So are you dating potential partners who are average in all respects? What in the world shall you talk to them about? When youre questioning whether Nietzsche was actually a nihilist based on the most elegiac passages of Thus Spake Zarathustra or when you marvel at Glenn Goulds playing, or when you think Blackadder is about 1000x wittier than The Big Bang Theory—what are you getting from your partner? Choose wisely and choose the wise. Work: If you were an elite mountain climber, youd want to summit K2 and Everest and Denali. If you have great intellectual asperity, do you think that being a barista or receptionist is going to do it for you? No. Its you whos settling for such things, rather than demanding for yourself the challenge, wherever that may lie. Peers: Aim for eudaimonia, Aristotles term for the happiness in life that arises out of fulfillment. To be fulfilled, you must do things you like. You must associate with people, professionally and personally, whom you respect and who offer something to you. You can be that solitary preacher promoting something, but if you receive nothing back you become quickly an emptied vessel. Find those more intelligent than you, have the self-confidence to learn from them. Otherwise youll be sitting atop the mountain and you may well be a god, but whom precisely will you be ruling?
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 01:07:22 +0000
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