Shoot.
> 1. I think there are very few As, just lots of Cs presenting themselves
> as As. Not everyone wears their mind on their sleeve.
I guess I wasn't clear. The A's don't admit to being A's. As Rohit
says, they don't even know they ARE A's. But the fact that they have no
trouble doing anything they set their minds to, clearly makes them A's.
We know several dozen examples of A's from Caltech alone, but as a
portion of the population, actual A's are few and far between.
Then again, how many out of the 5.8 billion people on the planet do you
think really affect the directions the planet and the people on it are
headed? How many people are in the set of 97% of the world's
intellectual discoveries, financial maneuvers, and power plays?
Maybe a few hundred thousand? Of them, I'd say about half are A's and
half are C's who are there through sheer force of will.
> 2. In what category do you put the botched, bungled, and desperately
> unhappy?
I guess I would call those mutated B's, the killer B's without the
"happy" gene usually attached to being a B. But I wonder how many such
people like that there are. I suspect that most of the B's are either
too busy struggling to survive or too busy watching television to have
time to be unhappy.
> 3. Out of curiosity, do you consider me an A or a C (or a B)? Many
> people judge me an A, which always surprises me.
I think you're a C. I think you struggle for your achievements, but
that you do have a good amount of natural resources (talent,
intelligence) you can call on.
> 4. The way I remember the joke, it was chocolate and Guinness.
As long as they're not together. Chocolate and beer, yuck.
> 5. If I had know you put yourself in category B, I would have beat you
> up about it a long time ago, mostly for coming up with such a lame excuse
> for not doing stuff. Far more honest to say, yes, I am capable, but right
> now it's too much work, or I'm stuck, or I'd rather drink, or whatever.
You have to understand that I am coming from a lifetime of struggles
without success, and that I watch a lot of television, read a lot of
books, listen to a lot of music, watch a lot of movies, and am generally
a happy person. I fit the stupid profile, in my mind. This is not
psyching myself out; this is a lifetime of observations coming to roost.
Plus, surrounding myself with brilliant people from Caltech, NASA, Rome
Labs, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft didn't help. It only showed me
true brilliance and true success and how far from both of those I felt I
was. Again, this is not depression speaking; this is honest
self-evaluation based on my past experiences.
Maybe I've never risen to the occasion, or maybe I never had it in me to
do so. I'm not sure. That's why I'm begrudgingly opening the
possibility that I may be a C instead of a B. I have to figure out what
resources it is that I have -- what can I do that no one else in the
world can? I'm sure that it's something. But so far it hasn't been
anything I've so far done in my life. That is the deflowering to which
I was referring: bursting the bubble that I knew my place in the world.
Now suddenly I'm not so sure what my place in the world is; I only know
that I MUST leave school to find it. Before, I thought I could find my
place while I was in school, and I tried that in earnest, but I did not
succeed. So now, I will either graduate or drop out, and then (and only
then) will I start looking for my place in the world again. As a
consequence, I must leave school as soon as possible. I trust in my
advisor to help me with the one goal, my prime directive until it is
fulfilled from herein.
Does that make sense?
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
One of the things the old guy also does at the end is salute the
gravestone he's talking to, which was something I saw coming from so far
away that I had time to step aside and write a short treatise on free
will as it relates to independent thought before stepping back in harm's
way and being smacked in the kisser by the runaway freight train that is
Spielbergian manipulation at its finest.
-- Mr. Cranky reviews "Saving Private Ryan"