This definitely describes my experience, and gave me a bit of help in correcting course, so thank you.
Also, I recall an Aella tweet where she claimed that some mental/emotional problems might be normal reactions to having low status and/or not doing much interesting in life. Partly since, in her own experience, those problems were mostly(?) alleviated when she started “doing more awesome stuff”.
Thinking about status reminded me of the advice “if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in a wrong room”. Like, on one hand, yes, if you move to a place with people smarter than you, you will have a lot of opportunity to learn. On the other hand, maybe you were high-status in your old room, and become low-status the new room. And maybe the low status will make you feel so depressed, that you will be unable to use the new opportunity to learn (while maybe you would google something in the old room).
This of course depends on other things, such as how friendly are the people in the new room, and whether your smartness was appreciated in the old room.
(Hypothetically, the winning combination would be to surround yourself with smarter people you can learn from, and simultaneously have such a giant ego that you do not feel low-status, and simultaneously also somehow the giant ego should not get in your way of actually learning from them.)
Can confirm, I’m able to get into rooms where I’m easily the dumbest person in them. Luckily I know how to feel less bad, and it’s to spend more time/energy learning/creating stuff to “show” the rest of the group. (Now the bottleneck is “merely” my time/energy/sleep/etc., like always!).
...
I… think your comment, combined with all this context, just fixed my life a little bit. Thank you.
In “How Life Imitates Chess”, Garry Kasparov wrote:
Every person has to find the right balance between confidence and correction, but my rule of thumb is, lose as often as you can take it. Playing in the open section and going 0-9 every time is going to crush your spirit long before you get good enough to make a decent score. Unless you have a superhuman ego, or totally lack one, a constant stream of negativity will leave you too depressed and antagonized to make the necessary changes.
(Hypothetically, the winning combination would be to surround yourself with smarter people you can learn from, and simultaneously have such a giant ego that you do not feel low-status, and simultaneously also somehow the giant ego should not get in your way of actually learning from them.)
A much more probable combination is for those with minimal ego, yet who are tough as nails.
There are examples of ‘giant egos’ able to effectively learn from a roomful of smarter folks, but that’s literally 1 in a million.
This definitely describes my experience, and gave me a bit of help in correcting course, so thank you.
Also, I recall an Aella tweet where she claimed that some mental/emotional problems might be normal reactions to having low status and/or not doing much interesting in life. Partly since, in her own experience, those problems were mostly(?) alleviated when she started “doing more awesome stuff”.
Thinking about status reminded me of the advice “if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in a wrong room”. Like, on one hand, yes, if you move to a place with people smarter than you, you will have a lot of opportunity to learn. On the other hand, maybe you were high-status in your old room, and become low-status the new room. And maybe the low status will make you feel so depressed, that you will be unable to use the new opportunity to learn (while maybe you would google something in the old room).
This of course depends on other things, such as how friendly are the people in the new room, and whether your smartness was appreciated in the old room.
(Hypothetically, the winning combination would be to surround yourself with smarter people you can learn from, and simultaneously have such a giant ego that you do not feel low-status, and simultaneously also somehow the giant ego should not get in your way of actually learning from them.)
Can confirm, I’m able to get into rooms where I’m easily the dumbest person in them. Luckily I know how to feel less bad, and it’s to spend more time/energy learning/creating stuff to “show” the rest of the group. (Now the bottleneck is “merely” my time/energy/sleep/etc., like always!).
...
I… think your comment, combined with all this context, just fixed my life a little bit. Thank you.
In “How Life Imitates Chess”, Garry Kasparov wrote:
A much more probable combination is for those with minimal ego, yet who are tough as nails.
There are examples of ‘giant egos’ able to effectively learn from a roomful of smarter folks, but that’s literally 1 in a million.