The world wants you to be average

27 Jun 2019

One of my favourite movie scenes is this one from The Pursuit of Happyness (2006):

“Don’t ever let somebody tell you… you can’t do something. Not even me. Alright?”

I was maybe 10 years-old when I first watched this. Even back then, before I had any peculiar ambitions or faced much adversity, it struck a chord with me. I’m not sure why.

I’ve experienced externally imposed limitations time and time again in my life. Say you set a goal to do $X$ and you go talk to someone more senior for advice on how to get there. The most common response is some form of: “Do (tangentially related) $Y_1$, then $Y_2$, …then maybe 10 years later, you’ll be qualified to do $X$.” The “requirement” here could be money, or 5+ years of work experience, or an MBA, or any number of the endless proxies for “look, I’m good enough!” that society likes to invent.

Wait, but why?

Is success necessarily a function of how many years you’ve been on planet Earth? Or how long you’ve been hammering at the same problem with the same tired tools? History seems to suggest otherwise.

“Don’t believe in the deferred life plan.”

— Sam Altman, Co-founder & CEO of OpenAI

The thing is, these people almost never come from a place of bad intention. Some of them even want you to do well, but this kind of stepwise progress is just so engrained in their own experience that it becomes impossible for them to conceive of a different path.¹

Very rarely, you find someone who says just the opposite. Someone who takes a chance on you because they see something in you that you may not yet see in yourself. Someone who not only believes you can do $X$ right away, but challenges you to strive for $X^n$.

This is a gift.

When you find this person, let them know, thank them, and spend as much time around them as possible. Find more people like them. A growth mindset is infectious. In my experience, these people tend to disproportionately congregate in Silicon Valley, for reasons I can’t quite articulate. The best possible thing is to be in an environment where this mode of thinking is default.

The world wants you to be average, but it needs you to be extraordinary.

This post is dedicated to all my mentors who believed in me, whether we interact regularly, or only once. I definitely need to show my appreciation more often.