1:41 AM (of Wednesday, July 31st 2024)
Today is Tuesday, July 30th 2024. Through consistency and deliberate practice, most people can attain a certain skill level in a subject or area. In school for example, everyone goes through the same schooling process and through the same math courses. Some people do well in the subject while others don't. Even those that do, aren't truly exceptional, they might have just put in more hours into the coursework and studied for longer than all the other students. There are also those who are able to grasp mathematical concepts quickly and easily, without much effort, but even they aren't exceptional, they're just far above average.
I think even the best students in math through schooling aren't exceptional. They haven't proven themselves yet. Everything taught in schools has already been solved, there are already answers for them. In History, in English, in Music, in any subject, everything taught has already been learned and solved by the people creating the courses and the millions of students who took the courses in just the previous year. There's actually only one way to be truly exceptional, and that is to accomplish something no one has ever accomplished before.
Whether it's an invention, or solving a problem no one ever has, exceptional is overcoming these, and it's really hard to attain. It's really hard and nearly impossible.
I've reached the highest levels in some areas. Let's take typing. The website TypeRacer is probably the most known competitive typing website on the planet. Back in 2014 when I was "competing" I was in the top 100 fastest typists on that website, probably rank 71 at my peak. I did compete against people in the top 10 too and beaten some of them, like people aren't always perfect and sometimes they will have a bad round while I have a perfect round, or vice versa. Yeah, so at one point I was one of the top typists in the entire world. Of course nowadays there's many people typing at over 150 WPM (words per minute), but back then it was a rarity, and my peak was 191 WPM.
I've never been able to breach 200 WPM because the difficulty ceiling just keeps rising and rising the more skilled you become in a subject. At some point you reach a skill level that less than 0.00001% of the population has ever attained, everything is just self discovery and walking down a path no one else has. The troubling thing is, you think other people can reach that same skill level because you were able to reach it. To you it comes easily. In reality, most people will probably never attain that skill level in their dreams even after putting in all their effort.
There's too many life events and obligations that prevent people from becoming good at something. At certain life stages, people don't have the time nor the energy to put forth so much effort into something. They pretty much have to be working in that area to become exceptional, it basically has to be their livelihood, there's no other way.
Even the people who become exceptional in something trivial and inconsequential such as video games, they put their livelihood into it. They stream, they have fans, they do competitions, it takes up all of their time and effort. It's hard to become exceptional in something without putting in all one's effort into that something. Most people just have too many obligations and life responsibilities to dedicate to a single pursuit. I have so many chores I have to do at home, I have to do menial work, I have to exercise, I have meetings and relationships and friendships to maintain. Then there's a never-ending amount of things to become exceptional in. What skill or area do I want to dedicate my entire life to and make it my livelihood in order to accomplish something others haven't? It's hard to choose because it's a list of infinity.
It's hard to become exceptional in games and accomplish something others haven't because every game that is released has already been tested and beaten by the creators of that game, and the beta testers of that game. No matter how difficult a game might be or a certain stage in a game might be, it's already been beaten by someone in the team, proven possible and an ending written for it. The stage Through the Fire and the Flames in Guitar Hero 3 was the hardest song in that entire game, and it was the only song I could never play, I'd beaten every other song in the game in middle school, I thought it was impossible and so did many others at the time, but the beta testers have already tested it and beaten it. This goes for every game that exists.
Yeah there are people exceptional in video games. I think it's stupid, but yeah their names will go down in history too, because they have millions of fans and a Wikipedia page created for them. We have a page for RandomPersonIMadeUp who won 7 tournaments in Random Game, so he's now a world famous and renowned figure that will go down in history, hurray. I think it's a shame that we celebrate such banality.
Is chess the same thing? It is a game, just played for fun. It's not any less intellectual than video games, because real time strategy games like Warcraft 3 can have you controlling 30 units each doing different things throughout the map, and you're micromanaging this. I feel it's kind of different for games like Counter-Strike, that's obviously not as intellectual as chess, because you just have to practice rote aiming and shooting quickly, and knowing good places to stand and so on, but it is still another game like chess.
Games like chess will have more prestige than games like Fortnight, because it is way more intellectually stimulating. I have played Fortnight actually, it's not great at all, the game sucks and I don't know how it ever took off. It's just walking around, grabbing some weapons, building stuff, and shooting at people. That's all. You only control one unit too, not an army like in chess, not an army plus buildings and resources like in Warcraft 3.
It's also hard to become exceptional in a creative field like writing or art or music. Every creation is an exceptional creation, because every creation is something unique. I can draw random lines on a piece of paper and I can guarantee no one else in the planet has every written that same exact thing, the same exact duplicate. Maybe someone has drawn something similar, but it's not the same exact thing. Same for music. Literally everything in a song can be the same, but there's one random finger snap added in at 1 minute into the song, and just that one element makes the entire song unique. Now what if the pitch was changed at the 1 minute mark from 6 to 6.1? Just that single pitch change makes the entire song unique too. Every creation is something no one else has ever made ever. Every singe one.
No one has ever written what I just wrote just now. This paragraph here that I'm writing is entirely unique. No one has written all of the previous words I've typed, plus this current paragraph I'm typing. It's entirely unique. All the concepts and ideas here are unique. Even if someone got everything the same, even just changing a single letter like th!s makes this entire writing unique. The letters and words themselves are not unique, but the combination of them into sentences, into paragraphs, those are unique.
Now what creative thing will people consider exceptional? For a creative thing to become exceptional, it needs a different criteria than something no one has done before, because that is every piece of creation ever. For a creative thing to become exceptional, it needs widespread visibility and interest. What does widespread mean? I'd say 99% of the contemporary and culturally relevant population. 99% of the population knows about the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci (he was a vegetarian). They know about the Titanic movie by James Cameron (he is vegan). They know about Harry Potter (by someone not a vegan/vegetarian, I wasn't deliberately coming up with them, I just thought of the Mona Lisa first and the Titanic second as something 99% of the population knows about).
What song does 99% of the population know about? The Happy Birthday song. I put "culturally relevant population" above because people that don't speak English might not know it. There's songs in Chinese that 99% of the Chinese population know about but few English speakers do. The hit song Baby by Justin Bieber, probably 99% of the relevant population knows about it.
Which artworks do 99% of the population know about? Company logos like Coca Cola, paintings by famous artists like The Last Supper.
Which writings do 99% of the population know about? Stories like Lord of the Rings with some fiction characters like Frodo Baggins.
It is possible to become exceptional in every creative area so that 99% of the population knows about it. If it doesn't reach 99% of the population, I think it wasn't exceptional then. I mean yeah if it reaches 97% of the population, that's arguably exceptional too, but I think if it reaches 97% of the population, it can very easily reach the last 2% needed to become exceptional. I think it's a good metric if we had to use one, for a creative piece to be considered exceptional.
Anyway I'm sleepy. I have so much to do tomorrow. I don't know if I'll get everything done.
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