A few weeks ago, I read an article by a young adult who was considered a child prodigy. It was an honest and refreshing look into her struggles in adjusting to the reality that her skills are overall average in a world full of gifted people. She correctly pointed out that failure can be excruciating for honor students. They’re used to breezing through academic challenges, so they never developed adequate frustration tolerance. To protect their egos from getting hurt, they will opt to underperform in college instead of getting low grades despite their best efforts.
Previous research has shown that such fear of failure among honor students has real-world ramifications. Boston College researcher Karen Arnold noted in her 15-year longitudinal study that after high school, well-rounded and sociable academic achievers are generally successful --- within the system. Meaning, they’re not innovators though they may be excelling. Prof. Arnold wrote that the honor students in her study were pragmatic: they wanted well-paying careers, so they strove to meet society’s requirements to land lucrative jobs. They think and behave as expected by the higher-powers-that-be. And society rewards them for complying. So why risk failure in changing a system that benefits you? Why behave differently if doing so will make other people think that you’re inferior? The downside though is that the most groundbreaking and financially rewarding ideas won’t come from such a mainstream group. Those disruptions will come from non-conformists.
Perhaps some of those original thinkers are honor students too. Psychologist Adam Grant wrote that whether they are academically-inclined or not, what’s common among successful non-conformists is that they take great risks in causes that they believe in while remaining extra cautious in other areas. Innovators also set themselves apart by producing larger quantities of work. While some of their output might be dismissed as ordinary or sub-par, they serve as excellent pools of several novel ideas. In contrast, conformists are fixated on generating a few ideas that they think are perfect. They then become overconfident about their worldviews and build much of their lives upon them. When their views are criticized, they’re more concerned about protecting the reputations that they’ve staked on their beliefs than in studying the issues in-depth.
To test these findings, I searched online for other articles written by the honor student-writer who I mentioned at the beginning of this entry. I wanted to see whether her ideas were groundbreaking or mainstreamish. And as I predicted, her writings were filled with opinions that were parroted from corporate media pundits. The good news though is that she’s still young. She has a lot of time to unlearn popular yet erroneous beliefs. Besides, not everyone is meant to change the world. If everyone is innovating, then who would accomplish the equally important task of keeping the system stable and efficient? So let’s not pressure everyone into constantly reinventing the wheel. Each person should have the freedom to live as he sees fit as long as he doesn’t threaten other people’s lives and liberties. The problem though is that it’s now chic to embrace pseudointellectual totalitarian views...and our academic achievers are gobbling them up.
(Photo by Leon Wu)