This article is selling a narrative that you want to hear with a huge dollop of confirmation bias as andy_ppp points out. It's not very likely that you or your family are that 0.01%[1], but it is very likely that you think you are exceptional.
(I wish you all and your family all the best, but one needs to be very careful around this kind of narrativium.)
The opposite side of the problem is that sometimes people continually tell you you're exceptional, talented, capable, and driven, while you point to your record of actual accomplishments and proclaim your mediocrity.
you could also just have a ton of below average coworkers so your mediocrity is still amazing. This is what happens in highschool sports. Folks mistake "above average" which is get you to college sports (I played D3 I know) with exceptional, eg Pro, or even All Star Pro. Few can even tell at that level.
I enjoyed myself a lot by going to a place where I was continually challenged in a domain I didn't know, games. Learned a ton, including humility, and got way better. It broke a lot of my assumptions or held beliefs with plain evidence to the contrary.
I hugely enjoyed my last job: the coworkers were all above my skill-level in practically everything, but somehow still liked having me around. I learned loads and built great relationships. We still keep in touch.
Pity our client cancelled the big project I'd been hired on for, revenue flow never quite got back up, and I was the only person in the company who couldn't do hardware dev :-(.
No, not at all. The missing ingredients are drive from an early age, extreme privilege from almost birth, and/or efficiency of work-ethic from an early age.
You can crank things out by putting in a lot of hours, to work towards a goal, but that's not actually enough. You needed to learn how to just process things efficiently and mechanically from the start.
You shouldn't have grown a sense of drive at age 23 and then needed to figure out how that works. You should have been efficient since forever, and then been able to deploy that towards drive at whatever age. Ideally, you should have had drive starting around age 14 on top of efficiency.
Provided you never managed any of those things, you should have just been born right. It's easy to hit all the top-ranked targets in life without having efficiency, or even an idea or drive before adulthood -- provided someone sent you to prep school, put you through top universities, and let you know you could start a business without worrying about ever starving or missing rent.
(I've met some people as privileged as that last description. The best among them is absolutely one of the most friendly, helpful, overall nice people I've ever met. Many of them are self-aware about the whole thing. Those who are neither nice nor self-aware are a danger to society, and IMHO haven't really earned it. Oh, and worse, some of the non-nice, self-unaware ones are in some very, very high places. Apparently they're awkward at parties, too.)
A meta observation around the reaction to the word "exceptional" based on some posters' comments:
- lomnakkus: "It's not very likely that you or your family are that 0.01%[1], but it is very likely that you think you are exceptional."
- deepGem: ", being frustrated with day to day life doesn't make one exceptional."
I think the problem here is that Mz's chosen word of "exceptional" makes it look like a superior attribute and self-aggrandizement. (This triggers a reaction: https://i.redd.it/1sd91qydx16z.gif)
So it seems like the word "exceptional" has too much positive connotation and that in turn triggers some to "knock the poster down a few pegs".
Can we find an alternative word that doesn't trigger that reflex? For whatever reason(s), a lot of entrepreneurs can't seem to conform to the typical 9-to-5 job. Maybe it is:
- ADD/ADHD
- DRD2 "thrill seeking" gene[1]
- mild sociopathic disorder[2]
- rule-maker or rule-breaker personality instead of rule-follower
- <some other dominant attribute>
Whatever the cause is, don't label it "exceptional" because it will lead to replies correcting you that "you're not exceptional".
How about another word such as "misfits"? If you're a person that sees no compatibility for careers such as programmer for BigCo, or doctor, or accountant, or teacher, etc, you'd self-diagnose yourself as a "misfit".
Those careers are all noble endeavors -- but they also all feel "wrong" to the misfit. In a conformist-economy, the paths for the misfit earning a living is very different: If you're a "creative misfit", you can write novels or be in a rock band and people overlook your eccentricities. If you're not artistic but see business opportunities, you become an entrepreneur.
Is there a better word than "misfit" that captures the spirit above but is also sufficiently self-effacing to not make people think one has a superiority complex?
Probably true, but 'twice exceptional' is the established term that describes what you are saying [1]. For example, someone who has 'genius' IQ (of 98th percentile) along with an uncommon neurotype (ADHD, autism-spectrum, dyslexia). These people often don't fit the stereotype of 'genius' nor their neurotype - and so are double 'misfits'. Probably the term 'twice exceptional' was chosen as more tact than 'double misfit', as these people often not accepted to normal society, especially as youth.
"For whatever reason(s), a lot of entrepreneurs can't seem to conform to the typical 9-to-5 job."
In my experience (almost 30 yrs of working at all sorts of companies, 2 startups of my own, lots of friends and acquaintances with their own businesses) the most people I've seen who are most successful at launching and running their own firms were those who did VERY well at previous 9-to-5 jobs.
That said, I've known plenty who did well at 9-to-5 jobs who didn't do so well with their own company. So I don't think that's a predictor for success, per se.
But I do think not being able to handle a regular job is, quite possibly, a negative indicator. I mean, face reality, MOST people don't like to go to a 9-to-5 job very much. After all, if they weren't being paid, 99% would not show up.
Perhaps the people that do well at a 9-5 and do well as an entrepreneur don't do well at the 9-5 because they're a model employee by nature but rather because they seek to be the best at whatever they do, however they can.
FWIW, at least as far as I can know my own mind, my comment wasn't spurred by any notion of perceiving as OP being "arrogant" or thinking that they are "a special snowflake" or anything like that.
It's just that unlikely statistical events are... unlikely even though they often do happen to someone (in aggregate). As an individual, and without compelling evidence, it's simply meaningless to think that you're anything other than average in most respects.
It's just that unlikely statistical events are... unlikely even though they often do happen to someone (in aggregate).
You may think you mean well, but your original comment came across as ugly and dismissive and personally attacking. I didn't provide any evidence that I am some extreme outlier because a) that wasn't the point and b) people who know me already know I am twice exceptional and don't need that elaborated on.
You also fail to understand some basics about statistics and life, the universe and everything and that is this: That which is a longshot is unlikely to happen to any specific individual, but guaranteed to happen to someone. So if it is "one in a million odds," with a human population of 7 billion people, there should be 7000 such people somewhere on earth.
Given that this is the internet, you can easily run into any one of those 7000. Like you, they just need an internet connection, which is as common as dirt these days. You could even stumble into a forum that, for some reason, tends to aggregate such individuals. In which case, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of the people actively participating in the forum could well be that "1 in a million" outlier.
You completely misread my original comment and then personally attacked me and told me that I am basically an idiot who just likes the narrative they are selling. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I was Director of Community Life for a few months for The TAG Project. While I was director, I got support for attending a gifted conference in the Boston area and I heard speak or met some of the luminaries in the gifted field, such as Kathi Kearney.
Prior to the conference, Kathi Kearney was already internet familiar with me due to my work for The TAG Project, and we had a nice little conversation following her presentation. Based in part on that conversation, I strongly suspect that my oldest son's IQ can be guestimated as "probably over 200, possibly waaaaay over." He also has such big problem areas that he was almost an idiot-savant when he was a child, and I really had to work with him to get him functional in some areas.
We will never know what his IQ actually is because you cannot accurately peg an IQ that high with adult testing and he is now 30. Last I heard, such people need to be properly assessed by a qualified professional specializing in such things by about age 7 in order to have any kind of accurate IQ number (and he was 12 before he was identified as gifted, in part due to his poor school performance).
So hand-wavy guestimates based on mom's discussion with some luminary in the gifted field is as good as it will ever get. That and perhaps someday he will be famous for his work and widely lauded as a "genius." That would be cool, but I honestly don't care if it goes that way or not. Such things are not hugely important to me. They never were, which is why I gave up my National Merit Scholarship in my teens, dropped out of college and went and did the wife and mom thing for a lot of years. (shrug)
I really don't understand why you addressed this comment to me...? I think I specifically stated that I wasn't being dismissive of your experience?
(Also, assuming you're telling the truth, I think it might also be imprudent to divulge so much of your life story online. It'd be very easy to gather a lot of detail about you that might lead to a spearphishing attack or similar. You should probably ask a mod to delete some of your comment, or do it yourself if the time limit hasn't expired.)
This article is selling a narrative that you want to hear with a huge dollop of confirmation bias as andy_ppp points out. It's not very likely that you or your family are that 0.01%[1], but it is very likely that you think you are exceptional.
(I wish you all and your family all the best, but one needs to be very careful around this kind of narrativium.)
You may not mean it to be dismissive, but it absolutely is. It is also overly personal since most of my original comment was about the article. Comments about me and my sons were merely in support of those points.
I'm not sure exceptional is the right word. I wouldn't even call it 'gifted'. Maybe its just being able to function better when the conditions are not ideal and the pressure is up, as opposed to when things are fine and there is nothing to worry about.
There are multiple definitions of gifted, including "having a special talent." It doesn't inherently mean that someone has a genius level IQ. By various definitions, 10 percent or more of the population can qualify for the label, last I heard, back when I was involved in such things.
(I wish you all and your family all the best, but one needs to be very careful around this kind of narrativium.)
[1] Made up number, obviously.