The Myth of Superman

I am always astounded by child prodigies. What astounds me are not their fast rates of learning or exceptional intelligence at such early ages or graduating college at 13. What astounds me is how they end up becoming such nobodies in life. You expect that these geniuses are going to be the ones to bring us a cure for cancer or cold fusion or at least a decent novel or movie. But I'm still waiting. The reality is that the majority of them go on to lives of utter normalcy. They were oddities and not much else.

When you see these kids, you get a bit of Salieri Syndrome. You wonder to yourself. What the fuck am I doing with my life? But I never feel this way because I wonder what these child prodigies end up doing with their lives, and the answer is generally a whole bunch of nothing. Why is it this way? Why don't they become the great people we imagine them becoming?

The answer to that is pretty obvious. Most of the advances we have experienced as a civilization come from accidents, combinations of other ideas, competition, and the like. Edison is without a doubt the greatest American that ever lived. Yet, he was not alone in inventing. His day was just like our day with Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page. Edison just worked a bit harder, but he still lost out to guys like Marconi, Bell, and Tesla. The fact is that great people are often the product of great times. Genius rarely develops in isolation.

The child prodigy thing dovetails into a larger fairy tale that I call the Myth of Superman. Basically, people carry around in their heads an idealized version of themselves. This person is hyperintelligent, fit, popular, accomplished, etc. This person is without bad habits such as overeating, smoking, drinking, drug abuse, etc. This may go on into personal relationships. Regardless of what this ideal looks like, people have it and measure themselves by it. The result is a feeling of despair.

Gurus tap into this desire to become the Superman (or woman.) They give you life coaching, tips, tricks, techniques, or what have you in an attempt to "optimize" your life. No one does this better than Tony Robbins.



Tony Robbins is just a high school graduate. He has not developed a cure for cancer or cold fusion. Basically, he has discovered "personal power" which he then sells to other people. Tony Robbins is a nobody peddling snake oil. People wanting to improve their lives buy it. This is how Tony Robbins became rich. Naturally, he is virtually deified as the embodiment of his principles. But those principles are crap.

Here's the dirty secret of life. Your success is directly related to your work ethic. Some may become successful through luck (Paris Hilton) or lying to a bunch of shitheads in exchange for money (Kevin Trudeau), but repeatable patterns of achievement have hard work as the foundation. Let us consider those child prodigies again.

John Stuart Mill was a child prodigy. I don't think this was a result of superior genetics so much as a father who decided to rear him with rigorous academic instruction. It worked. Mill went to become a very intelligent young person until he cracked at age 20 from the program. I think you can take almost any child and produce similar results. But we don't do this shit today. We let kids be kids. The exceptions are the parents of today's child prodigies that repeat the same experiment that James Mill did with his son.

Excellence in any endeavor is the product of repetition. This is how you learn language, music, mathematics, dance moves, etc. You can spend this time washing dishes or learning violin. At the end, you are either a really good dishwasher or a really good violinist. The difference is the value we place on the activity. Sad to say, most academic proficiency is better for little more than being a contestant on Jeopardy.

A gift is nothing more than a knack for a particular activity. For instance, Shaquille O'Neal has a knack for dunking basketballs. He does not have a knack for tossing up free throws. Giftedness is helpful, but time has a way of diminishing their value. This is because others often catch up to you like the tortoise and the hare. People who peak early tend to decline from there. Others peak later. Then, there are the late bloomers who do amazing things even in retirement.

I think people should give themselves a break on this shit. This is because Superman doesn't exist. If you look at examples of accomplished individuals throughout history, the thing that is most striking are their deficiencies. Isaac Newton was a recluse and a social misfit. Einstein was a terrible student. Edison could be a real dickhead. Leonardo was mostly a dreamer instead of a doer. Jefferson ended up broke. On and on, we can go.

The fact is that we all are faced with the same limitations of time, money, and energy. People who are really good at something tend to suck at everything else. This is why even accomplished people in various fields turn to the likes of Tony Robbins. Naturally, they get included in his self-promotion as endorsers. But the fact is that Robbins is still a nobody while these somebodies still don't have their shit together.

I was talking with my boss yesterday about the whole self-improvement genre. Business types and managers are deep into this bullshit reading all sorts of business books that amount to little more than the shit Robbins espouses. "Time management" and "focus" and "goals" get tossed out there a whole lot. The sad reality is that the reason most white collar people don't accomplish anything is because they are doing things that are worthless and calling it "work." Blue collar people like me don't experience this because we don't spend our days in fruitless conference calls and meetings or shooting emails back and forth all fucking day. We just go in and work. At the end of the day, shit is done. Everything else is just talk.

The blue collar approach is stone simple. Establish your goals. Make sure those goals are worth achieving. Then, put on the hard hat and work. That's it. It is pretty fucking ridiculous but not as ridiculous as the endless meetings, conference calls, and emails trying to answer the same question. Why is shit not getting done? The answer is that people talk about work more than they work. The great mystery to me is why these people get paid.

These business types and all the rest think the problem is a lack of ambition. This isn't true. It is simple laziness. The problem isn't that the goals aren't high enough. It is that people spend their days daydreaming about how nice it would be to do that shit. I am as guilty as anyone else on this.

The answer is modest goals that are achieved. This is the wisdom of Leo Babauta. His insight is counterintuitive. The way to achieve more is to aim for less. Focus on one thing. Eliminate distractions. Don't try to be rich. Learn to live with less. On and on and every bit of it is true because the guy actually lives it. He isn't Superman. He is Everyman. Everyman will always kick Superman's ass because Everyman is real. Superman is just a daydreamer in a cape.

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