Brian SD
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Mediocrity A: shutting out the world to protect your inflated ego, content with your abilities and your place, convinced you're great and valuable.
Mediocrity B: realizing and accepting that you're just filling in the gaps the great ones don't have time to fill in, shoveling snow that no one else wants to shovel (tm Hiraku Makimura)
Keep this quote in mind (courtesy of Mark Twain)
Mediocrity B: realizing and accepting that you're just filling in the gaps the great ones don't have time to fill in, shoveling snow that no one else wants to shovel (tm Hiraku Makimura)
Keep this quote in mind (courtesy of Mark Twain)
On my road home I came upon Satan, and reproached him with deceiving me
with that lie. He was not embarrassed, but said, quite simply and
composedly:
"Ah, you mistake; it was the truth. I said he would be happy the rest of
his days, and he will, for he will always think he is the Emperor, and
his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end. He is now, and
will remain, the one utterly happy person in this empire."
"But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn't you have done it
without depriving him of his reason?"
It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.
"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have
found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No
sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a
fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those.
The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no
happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind
at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have
taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind;
I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the
result--and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy,
and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to
his race--and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and
said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."