You’ll never be the best in your peer group!...and more…

-
This was written sometime back, after I learnt that one more of my friends had selected as his profession, what he believed he was good at over what he truly liked.
-----

Well, unless you are Einstein or somebody like that (by which I mean ‘the absolute best’), you’ll never be the best in your peer group, that is, provided you do not intentionally obstruct the flow of social dynamics.

Tried to explain this to Rapai (my younger brother) last week.

And why is that so? Simple, as you ‘move up’ (or down) in life so does your ‘peer group’. This peer group need not represent your best friends. It’s the group with which you have to interact everyday, the benchmark people around use to measure you.

You think you’re good in Math, so you decide to take a Math specialization. And what do you find? The class is filled with all the Math wizards who thought the same way. And the moment you prove (or think) yourself better, you move into an even advanced course and the same story repeats again.

Geniuses like Feynman too couldn’t escape it, he rose from peer group to peer group till he became a part of the most revered peer group (in his domain). Yet Dirac or Schwinger or Gell-Mann or Bethe was probably (and I hope this probably was negative in reality J) of the same intellectual might.

Some people create artificial obstructions to remain in the peer group where they are numero uno. But otherwise, you will be pushed up or down or in other directions till you’re finally in a group where, atleast according to societal norms, you’re not distinct (or maybe all members of the group are so distinct that your distinct is no longer distinct). Of course if you are Einstein, you are beyond all groups (and the whole wide world recognizes that). This hypothesis can explain many phenomena like say the rich trying to get richer and richer and richer (and always finds himself a tad bit poorer than his neighbours as he moves from Dharavi to Marine Drive to Manhattan).

What’s the way out (provided, of course, you want a way out; most people around are too much in the rat race to even realize that it’s a race)?

It’s to do what one likes…what one loves…for which he/she would be ready to give up everything else…

It’s only then that this peer thing becomes the nonsense that it deserves to be; both in your eyes and in the eyes of the people who care to think and understand (sadly this is an endangered species). That is when the ‘I don’t care’ does not ring hollow any longer. This also explains why people at the top of their trade strive to get still higher; by then, they’ve begun to love their trade, love their ‘game’. And many of the Einsteins had this attitude from day one.

The problem is, most people end up doing something because they think that they are good at doing it, not because they actually like it. In this case, what they really like is success, not the thing that they’re doing. And after sometime they’re elevated to a different peer group where they’re only average and it’s a matter of time before they don’t love the work (they never loved it too much in any case, it was the success they worshipped).

Very few people have the guts to do something, even when they’re not good at it, just because they love it. It’s great if you’re good at it as well as you love it, nothing like that. The test comes when you love something you’re not good at, and most of us fail to follow our love (that’s one reason we have this whole business of hobbies). The thing is, if you start doing something you love, even if you are not good at it initially, in time, your love for it and joy from it (and not the competitive threat) will bring out the best in you.

And even if you fail there is the joy of doing what you truly loved (though, actually you become impervious to those dumb societal norms of success and failure).