The Best Know the Least About What They Are Doing
Making People with the Best Reputation a Little Less Mysterious.
There is always one most intelligent student in a college year, collecting the best marks, having the best reputation ever, and slaying at everything. Those people are not necessarily the way we think they are. More often than not, the all-rounders know a lot less.
For us to understand how winners in a social group — usually a college year, or employers at a company — they might know much less than we do, we need to rethink how life for such a succeeder looks like. I was that kind of person for many years, and I don’t try to generalize, but to reflect on what it means being the best at anything.
Our Lives are Boring
For you to be good, you have to know a lot. You have to have a clear mind, that is logical, that is complex, that can absorb information in a short time. It is what the people who succeed do — they are always efficient. I have been there, having 5 extracurriculars and classical piano lessons (just to fulfill the Chinese stigma, of course). Once you do have things to do, anything you want, there is no other purpose in your day-to-day life than to do just that.
You can have side hustles, you can have extracurriculars, or anything. You name it. Once you identify with whatever you do, you want to just keep doing it. “You have already been doing it for so long”, our mind says. So, I keep reading as fast as the one time where I was in an exam that got me a great mark. I pay attention to what helps me to get better — in school, but also as an employee — and I just repeat. It is so boring, now that I think about it.
Often, those who people look up to can indeed do anything, because they know how to succeed. They feel success, they embody success because doing those things which might lead there is their number one priority. Mark here, that I say do what leads to success, and not do successful things.
People who fail at being the best focus on being the best, while those who really are the best focus on repeating what has made them succeed in the past.
Really, success is very easy for those who are already successful. So easy. When I was in that state, I couldn’t even understand how someone could spend one day just doing nothing, or living a normal life being so inefficient. Without dissing anyone further, here we are, understanding that being successful is extremely easy. None of the intelligent all-rounders will tell you how they do what they are doing. None of their tips will ever help you, because they don’t know that everything they have been doing just consisted of three steps.
- Succeed
- Keep in mind what got you to succeed
- Repeat
I feel like those people are dumb. I think that I am dumb myself. Yes, I have an IQ above 130, but no, when I am in the flow state, I am really nothing. Often, those people who know everything are actors that play with their own minds. They act not just in front of you, but also in front of themselves. There is always a question that, if hard to answer, intuition will solve for those people. That applies to maths, too. Intuition is key. Anyone with a good relationship with their intuition has won the race and survives as the fittest if you will. However, this intuition takes you far from rationality, awakeness, or mindfulness.
Falling Into Intuition Equals Falling Into Unknowingness
One thing that makes me and others special, is that we trust our intuition. It is something so complex that I hope I can present accurately here. People who are great trust themselves. They themselves are their intuition. Their success is built by their intuition, which they trust 100%. If you want to call someone and you are successful, you will not rephrase or repeat your sentences one by one before calling, you will wait for the person on the other side to answer your call, and based on your intuition, you will start saying what your intuition tells you is right to say.
In chemistry class, for example, I had straight A's the whole school year, but I didn’t understand a thing in chemics. Yes, I could explain our tasks at hand and everything, but I doubt I ever understood more than the classmates who had straight Fs. All I did was to trust my intuition. It is about performing when you don’t think that you are performing at your best. The moment you think about not thinking is the moment you ultimately know you are going to fail — and with that realization, it will get worse.
This intuition that guides people like me is called the flow. Although I agree with what I find on the internet, the flow has to be understood as a lifestyle. Successful people do everything they do in the flow. When they have problems with getting into the zone, they will most certainly avoid it or manipulate their minds to work with it anyway, but they would not perform as well.
The Flow is a state of mind for most people, but for us, everything we are doing is done in the zone. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a reason to start doing it anyway. If you decide to do something, you give it your best shot. There’s no purpose in doing it in any other way.
The Best Does Never Know That He Is The Best
When I was in the state of being the best, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. If someone who is the best knew, he would instantly lower his own standards and be impressed by everything he has accomplished himself. When you read an article and are impressed by it, or when someone gets great marks and you are impressed by it, always be aware that the people, who you might look up to, don’t look up to themselves. They are not impressed of what they are doing. They embody what they do, are, have, with all the things you find great about them.
The best will never feel the awe that the majority of their environment feels for them.
For them, there is really nothing to brag about, talk about, anything. They just live their lives speaking up for the problems that society says matter, doing things that meet approval or fulfill their needs.
In a Way, the Best is the Greatest Prisoner of All Time
When we are inspired by something, we change, we feel freer, and we can crawl out of our comfort zone to widen horizons. People who are over-achievers cannot do that. I am already an advocate of the idea that we are all prisoners of our minds, but those are prisoners of their minds on a whole other level.
Their minds are already open, like, really open, because they can learn a lot, think constantly, and have interests in all fields. But here comes the shortcoming! They don’t know how it feels like, having on intention in any action. They don’t know how to enjoy the moment. They — the most intelligent ones, the best ones — are the worst for people to understand fellows’ miserables. They trust their intuition so much that they have stopped second-guessing themselves. They are one of those people who, once they have an opinion, will want to stick with it until their intuition tells them otherwise.
In a way, the over-achievers are isolated in silence. Everyone knows them, everyone admires them, but they won’t understand. It is as if they were living in their own movie where the intuition does all the job for them. They have empathy, of course. They are people, of course. But do they understand what others see in them? NO. Do they understand why others are so different? NO.
They are prisoned in the way that they are unwilling to understand or to accept that other people are different. They trust their senses so much it can be toxic for others.
You are not special if you are the best; you are just rare. And if you have never felt isolated because you had the greatest marks or because everyone was just jealous of your alongside achievements and hustles, then you are spared one of the most common causes for mental inbalance.
