A slang term often used to laugh at people's overreaching is "Take a piss and look at yourself". Time is urine with the nature of "looking in the mirror", which penetrates a person's elaborate external disguise and shows the inner essence of "ugliness". As far as I am concerned, the "essence" I don't want to face is mediocrity. Life makes us discover that I have no talent beyond others in any field. More sadly, in many valuable fields, my epiphany is the basic point of others, that is, I must.
Statistics show that the vast majority of individuals are at the average level. This means that in any field, the vast majority of people are of average qualifications. Take height as an example, China1400 million people have a Yao Ming. In today's live broadcast field of fire, it is Victoria and Li Jiaqi who monopolize almost all transactions. Talent is like a lottery ticket. There are at most one or two winners, so it is normal for most people to be mediocre in most fields.
The problem is that under the fierce competition, people's anxiety about their own and even their children's mediocre qualifications is constantly burning themselves. Parents, in particular, seem to find it more difficult to accept their children's mediocrity, because they are mediocre and have not achieved remarkable achievements in life, so they pin their hopes on the next generation and invest a lot of resources in their children's education. When they find that their children are as mediocre as they are, and have shown nothing extraordinary, their parents will be quite frustrated. A father who loves his daughter deeply said: I am very satisfied with my daughter's grades. My daughter is a mediocre child without advanced research knowledge, but it doesn't mean that she can't lead a wonderful life.
The father expressed a general prejudice that he could not achieve great things with average qualifications. "Mediocrity" has a slight derogatory meaning, so we should replace it with the neutral word "mediocrity" from another angle. The father's words above expressed his love for his daughter and also revealed a trace of loss. This kind of negative emotion is expressed because of "mediocrity". If it were "ordinary", his sense of loss would not be so obvious. Statistical research shows that the individual characteristics in almost all fields are characterized by normal distribution, that is, the number of particularly good or particularly poor individuals is quite small, and most individuals fluctuate around the average value.
So in terms of probability, we and our children are very likely to fall near the average. This means that we are born with mediocrity, so the first step to get rid of mediocrity is to change a word, such as "mediocrity" to describe ourselves and our children. You may ridicule, this is not a concept of stealing. I tell you clearly: no! The choice of words has a serious influence on people's thinking and psychology. For the same concept, choosing one word is equivalent to stabbing in the back, and choosing another word is equivalent to spring breeze, so to get rid of "mediocrity", we must first change our derogatory views on it.
The main body that changes the world is ordinary people. There is no denying that there are some super geniuses in history who changed the world after an inspiration, such as Newton, genius mathematician Gauss and Euler, who started the modern scientific system. However, such people are very few, and it is difficult to appear for hundreds of years. If the world must rely on these geniuses to develop, then we will never have such a life scene.
If you look closely, some recognized geniuses don't seem to show much difference in the early days. The most typical one is Einstein, who was always at the bottom of the class. After graduation, he couldn't find a good job. Finally, he entered the patent office through some connections and became an ordinary clerk. Before he "achieved great things", you said he was a genius, and people around him would think it was a "nonsense" joke. Edison, the super inventor who invented the electric light, did not seem to show the characteristics of "genius". When looking for filament materials, he used the most stupid method, that is, the exclusion method, and made a slow and tedious attempt to exclude thousands of materials before finding tungsten wires.
Old examples like Einstein and Edison refute the conclusion that ordinary people "have no ability to learn advanced knowledge". Facts have proved that many "profound knowledge" are great contributions made by ordinary people through accumulating wealth and making little money. Timothy Gals, a great mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, also known as the Fields Prize, talked about systematic research in his general work Mathematics, especially analyzing why outstanding female mathematicians are rarely seen. He mentioned that it is not that women's IQ is inferior to that of men, but that long-term distorted ideas have buried their way up in the field of science and technology. Many parents and teachers believe that girls can take the lead before junior high school, but after high school, because of "intelligence can't keep up", mathematics and physics will not work. This wrong idea leads parents and teachers not to pay attention to and invest in the growth of girls' mathematical and physical abilities. What's more harmful is that girls themselves believe these misconceptions and think that their intelligence is really not suitable for "mathematics and physics", so they give up their efforts and then form the effect of "self-certification and prediction".
Any knowledge and skill is a strict logical self-consistent system. Take daunting mathematics as an example. Many people's understanding of mathematics stays at the Olympic level, so they think that mathematics is a skill to open a brain hole and engage in a series of whimsy. In Gals' view, mathematics is actually a logical system that is linked and supported layer by layer. Every concept and theorem is on the steps of the math building. You must walk step by step, and once a step is empty, you will fall. Therefore, the difficulty in learning mathematics is that if a certain piece is not thoroughly understood, the subsequent learning will not go on. It's like a sophisticated machine. If one part doesn't turn, the whole machine will go on strike. After entering high school, the knowledge density of mathematics has increased, and difficult concepts and theorems often appear. Once you can't understand them, logical defects will appear frequently. After many setbacks, later generations flinched and simply gave up.
Good talent and high IQ are excellent advantages, but they are not necessary. A clever brain and a quick grasp of complex concepts or operations will naturally be one step ahead of others in progress, but the complexity of the knowledge system makes it useless to be quick for a while, just as Bolt can't win the marathon championship no matter how fast he is. Even if the IQ is average, reading a basic concept several times and practicing a basic operation several times is nothing more than spending more time than talented people, and eventually both of them can reach the same level, which is why most mathematicians are not all geniuses with high IQ. Gals found that even in the advanced field of mathematics, the smartest person is not the last leader, and the most tenacious person is constantly focusing on his own time and energy, which is closer to success. All knowledge or skills are the same, not a question of whether you can do it, but a question of whether you are willing to do it.
Any ordinary person like you and me has unlimited possibilities in the future. Humans are the only animals that can achieve ascension and evolution through learning. Every normal person has his own material basis for unlimited improvement, that is, a brain that can operate healthily. The real strength of the brain lies not in the fast operation speed of the hardware, but in the powerful function of the software running on it. The so-called "software" is to establish a series of strict logical systems and thinking abilities in the brain through acquired learning, and then guide the body to interact with the environment and obtain good results.
Therefore, the difference between people is not the strength of hardware at the beginning, but whether the brain software can be continuously upgraded through knowledge input in the future. More importantly, there is no upper limit for promotion. As long as you are willing to continue learning, your cognitive ability will continue to improve. The essence of life is a marathon rather than a 100-meter sprint, and the final result depends on the accumulation of running amount rather than the speed in an instant.
Maintaining rational optimism in learning is the key to break through mediocrity and move towards Excellence. Not for girls, not for ordinary children, not for childhood trauma, and not for people over xx. If we use these static and rigid concepts to deal with the flowing and changing living conditions, then failure is inevitable. Too many limited and self-contained ideas fill our discourse system, which in turn affects our thinking. Therefore, without careful screening, it is easy for people to fall into these pessimistic arguments, make excuses for their inaction, and feel at ease that they have achieved nothing because of their mediocre ability.
The laws of physics and biology make the vast majority of individuals in the group at the average level, and the best way to break through this limitation is to continue self-education. Even if we go back to the simplest and most instinctive thing-eating, there is a saying that "a bite is not fat." Being too bound by qualifications and talents will make you unable to learn any knowledge and practice any skills, and eventually lead a bad life, which further verifies all kinds of "unreasonable theories". The most terrible thing is that you will pass this idea on to the next generation. You will be anxious about your child's congenital mental deficiency, neglect the long-term careful education and training of your child, and finally let your child fall into the whirlpool of mediocrity.
Getting rid of mediocrity is not about making great achievements. As long as you keep educating yourself, let your cognition and skills break through the past, produce some works in specific fields, or establish your own unique cognition, if you can earn some money through your own ability training and make yourself and your family live better, then you have already broken through mediocrity. Excellence does not have to occupy the center of the stage and make itself the focus of the spotlight. As long as you keep growing, changing and breaking through yesterday's self, you are an excellent person, a person who can give yourself and others more possibilities.