Do you feel the agony of being a mediocre?
I have always felt this through out my life. The sadness associated with being average has always with me since I was a kid. It was there in the cricket ground where I struggled to bat; it was there when my friends were pleasing crowd with there awesome social skill and I was standing in the corner, shy and sad, just wondering how on earth they do it. Being average always kept me on my toes, scared and in-secured.
Even now, I feel that nauseating feeling when I am around someone really good; a good hacker, a good musician or may be someone who is rocking on the dance floor. I always wonder how people can be that good at what they do. And also what is the purpose of me trying those things if I am not good enough. Until recently, I was always baffled by this question. Few weeks back, I was reading Atul Gawande's Better where he talks about improving performances. How can we look at critically and quantitatively at performances, analyze the trends and bottlenecks and create work-around for improvement. My biggest take away was what he points out about "Averageness".
... I could tell myself, Someone's got to be average. If the bell curve is a fact, then so is the reality that most doctors are going to be average. There is no shame in being one of them, right?
Except, of course, there is. What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that averageness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain manners-looks, money, tennis-we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.
I guess I will have to seek the path of continuous development. I know that I might not become the best hacker or something like this but this will at least save my live from entering a limbo.