> There are many things to learn and ways to grow as a person, why beat ourselves up for not being very good at this or that particular thing?
I'd say that this takes a lot of work to unlearn, be it social media or whatever else seems to teach us to compare ourselves against others. Even though there are people way more brilliant than me out there (maybe they're naturally gifted, maybe they have a better work ethic, or different circumstances), it is definitely possible to be happy for their success, rather than lean into being jealous or what have you.
Of course, they will often achieve more than I will and will lead better lives as a result of that, but that's also something to accept and take in stride, rather than for example believing that I'm some temporarily embarrassed soon-to-be millionaire who's one good idea away from a lavish lifestyle. Not that it should discourage me from being curious about new ideas, even if writing my own particle simulation quite quickly ran into the n-body problem and also the issues with floating point numbers when the particles get close and the forces between them great.
What made you believe you were in the 99.999th percentile when going into university? (As opposed to something more realistic like the 99th percentile)
Unless you were literally outsmarting your teachers every day at age 16, it seems difficult to successfully fool yourself in this way.
There are a lot of things that one can be in the absolute top of, and overall academic achievement need not be one of them.
Speaking personally, when these articles come out, there are always a lot of comments about "I didn't really try super hard in high school, but college was a huge wakeup call for me and I had to learn to learn."
That wasn't me at all. I somewhat lazily skated through high school, and got a mix of 4s and 5s on AP exams. I did the exact same thing in college, with no change to my work/learning ethic, and lazily skated my way to finishing my 4-year molecular bio degree in 3 years, with a GPA of like 3.5 or so. Then I went to grad school, did more of the same for two years, and won an award for having the 2nd best masters thesis produced by the university that year.
Then I got a great job in my field doing cancer research, did that for 5 years, then jumped careers entirely and now work in robotics.
But you know what? I feel like I'm constantly surrounded by people smarter than me. I'm not some brilliant person, I'm just some dude that when presented with some problem, things just seem to make sense for a path forwards, and maybe my special thing is that I just always go explore that path and learn that either I was right or why I was wrong and that just pays dividends. When I see people around me who work hard at things, who study and memorize and read papers, they impress the heck out of me, because I really struggle to do the same thing. And when I do, I really struggle to absorb any information; if something doesn't make sense to me, it's like it just passes out of my head. I have to do/build/try it to make it make sense a lot of the time, or at least have things framed in a way that just intuitively makes sense for me.
Anyway, my point is that maybe I was the top 99.99% of something, because, clearly I was/am pretty good at some things that apparently most "gifted" people struggle with. But I never got a 4.0, I never aced all my classes, and I never really cared to as long as I felt I was getting what I needed to out of the classes. I did the work I needed to do to gain the information and skills I felt I was there for, and as long as the number assigned to me by the professor for doing so was at least an 80, I was happy.
> What made you believe you were in the 99.999th percentile when going into university?
Oh, nothing at all. I'm just a case of suddenly discovering in university that you also need good work ethic and that showing up alone is no longer enough (as a sibling comment points out) and you can't always cram all of the topics for exams in your head in a single night before the exam. In my case, calculus introducing new concepts (for which I didn't have a practical use, so it was even more confusing) and probability theory get less intuitive was that wake-up call. Well, that alongside an ASM course with a toolchain that I couldn't easily get working on my computer, or working with Prolog in similar circumstances, or understanding that I've underestimated how long making a 2D simulation project in C++ for extra credit would take, if I need to have collision detection and some physics for a soccer example.
That said, in my Master's studies, once I got to specialize in the things that were of more interest to me, I ended up graduating with a 10/10 evaluation for the thesis and 9.87/10 weighted average grade across the subjects. That's not like a super big achievement from a small regional university, but definitely goes to show that learning some things was easier for me than others. I probably need to venture outside of my comfort zone occasionally though and not just do the things that are comfortable.
I'd say that this takes a lot of work to unlearn, be it social media or whatever else seems to teach us to compare ourselves against others. Even though there are people way more brilliant than me out there (maybe they're naturally gifted, maybe they have a better work ethic, or different circumstances), it is definitely possible to be happy for their success, rather than lean into being jealous or what have you.
Of course, they will often achieve more than I will and will lead better lives as a result of that, but that's also something to accept and take in stride, rather than for example believing that I'm some temporarily embarrassed soon-to-be millionaire who's one good idea away from a lavish lifestyle. Not that it should discourage me from being curious about new ideas, even if writing my own particle simulation quite quickly ran into the n-body problem and also the issues with floating point numbers when the particles get close and the forces between them great.