The burden of excellence

Where has my love for learning gone? An autopsy

Seven things I know. Over the next week, I will be recollecting on lessons learned by experience or reflection in the last year. I promise to steer away from borrowed platitudes, or Instagram-worthy wisdom. The aim is not to sound smart or wise. Instead, I want to engage with the hardest personal subjects I dare to. These are field notes from the frontlines of unlearning. Maybe they'll spark your own uncomfortable conversations!

Day 1 — The burden of excellence

When you grow up as a straight-A student, life is insidiously difficult. For one, it's hard to garner any sympathy. Your expectations gradually narrow to accomodate an ever-shrinking set of successful outcomes.

Everything comes easily, so you never reckon with the possibility of failure until it's too late. Perhaps you aren't naturally lazy, but you become so. Any task, exercise, or requirement that school proposes as practice soon becomes distasteful. Why should I do countless repetitions of something I've already mastered? It seems petty and unfair. I understand why others need it, but if I don't, why can't I opt out?

Misaligned incentives turn into mistrust. Mistrust turns authority into the enemy. It's only natural that as demands increase, delinquency follows. Competing priorities begin to scatter attention and commitment. You start doing everything at the last minute: you prepare the day before the oral exam, the minute before submission, the hour before the test. You learn to gamble, take aggressively calculated risk. You become an expert in doing more with less, in avoiding any real skill building. New knowledge gets thrown into the last-minute cauldron too. You start to be picky on the projects you choose. You begin to craft the impostor’s toolkit.

Inner discipline isn't learned. It's inherited. It's absorbed through osmosis, perhaps developed internally through exposure to example.

One might think that this confidence in always being able to extricate oneself, to pull oneself up from any precipice by one's fingertips, would help in learning stress management. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because you expose yourself to fewer and fewer stressful conditions.

Instead, you learn to avoid them. You learn to distinguish between things that come naturally to you and things that don't; and you nest yourself in a cocoon of ease. You cherry pick a major where you can excel without effort. You lean on your academic potential until its steam runs out. Like a skier that is carried by the slopes and never learns to climb up the mountains again.

I was a Mathematics & Philosophy undergrad. In my first year of college, I won awards. In the second, I was comfortably in the top quartile. In the third, my results were barely average. What happened? I was not growing. The curriculum was speeding up and I my pace was constant. I was drawing on my potential without replenishing it.

Bolstered by prejudices, you begin to believe not only that your worth is a property of your achievements, but also that what you can achieve and obtain ultimately doesn't depend on you. Every eventual failure becomes an insurmountable mortification of your worth, a demonstration of your relative unworthiness.

You're never socialised to effort, to rebuild potential, to the value of practice. Difficult things are viewed with increasing suspicion, and you develop what can only be called cowardice. You still love to learn, but only what feels easy to learn.You have no shoulder to cry on. You're alone, in what feels like a white collar prison.

The narrow field of (poorly defined) successful outcomes and possible futures dissociate. So you take refuge in illusion, in escapist dreams where “I could do anything, if only…” When reality knocks back at your door, you feel crushed and paralysed.

Growing up gifted casts a long shadow.