I've had similar thoughts about "normal" Sebastian, but haven't succeeded in putting it into writing.

You can't be the best at everything, but you can choose a few things that really matter and absolutely crush those.

sometimes you are down of normal, i think in this case better to benchmark with normal

You get to a point where you have to prioritize. You only have so much time and energy.

So true and in the words of William Faulkner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

You know what, I'm going to repost my hackernews comment here, because I think it's absolutely important to benchmark ourselves against normal.

This is silly, benchmarking against normal is the only reprieve I get from worrying that I'm 24 and knowing that I am thus too old to have done a lot of things that I feel I should have by now, like publish a fiction book or two, found a successful startup, publish a couple of academic articles of the transformative kind to computer science and so on. At least publish any academic articles at all.

I mean, do you know that Turing was just 24 when he published the Turing Machine paper? And a mathematician whose name I can't remember right now, practically revolutionized set theory at ~22.

There's a bunch of other examples like that.
Hell, I have friends my age who've published more than one academic paper. Some of them highly acclaimed (enough so to present them at MIT)

Comparing to normal every once in a while is definitely the only way to keep one's sanity and allow oneself to get some sleep now and anon.

So for those of us who forget to realize how far they've come from/avoided being the average run-of-the-mill, rat-race pen-pusher, we should stop appreciating our hard work in the past? we should stop realizing how right we were then, and how right we may be now?

Respectfully, i think this is just your opinion decorated with a catchy title. if i didnt realize how far away from normal i was, i may have fallen back into it. the fact that i make x + Y% is a somewhat objective reminder that i kick ass and take names, and keeps me going.

success _is_ relative. if i made $300000 a year, but everyone else made $500000, i'd probably need to re-evaluate everything, considering that the price of all goods is relative to the availability of a currency in a capitalist economy(bread costs A because its some minute percentage based on what the average performing individual can afford). But now im digressing into economics :/

Being better off than most is a fuel to do more, do it better, and continue to succeed, for me at least. I can certainly see how it helps facilitate complacency for people of another personality. But what you claim here is not a universal truth.

Worst advice ever. Very depressing.

short and to the point.

I put this in a different way: don't compare with people worst than you.

Yeah well, as someone who thinks "if somebody managed it, then I can do it, and possible=easy", I can tell you it can be pretty bad to instinctively benchmark against the best, because you get mostly negative feedback on many things, limiting your motivation.

So in essence, my conclusion is that the best you can do is always benchmark against people who are slightly better, so you know you can get better, but the mountain doesn't look that big.

For better perspective, benchmark against the best and the worst, but that'll require far more wisdom to deal with.

As other people pointed out, one must pick his fights - however that doesn't in any way affect the way you benchmark.

Last but not least, the main part in taking advantage of this kind of advice is to actually learn to live with the conclusions of the benchmark, since that's where most people fail.

That is more than a bit related to the attitude towards failure: When someone tells me I'm wrong and explains to me why, I'm glad I learned something.

Living like that for 26 years (think about all the times you avoided the risk of looking stupid during that time) means I'm almost always right even on topics I have no experience of (been training my deduction too ... while I was at it), and I still prefer risking looking stupid (which I often do) than risking dying stupid.

Great thought, but by setting too extraordinary of a benchmark you may feel like you are constantly under-accomplishing. You need an equilibrium, I guess.