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I think this analogy is becoming more true as our economy slowly crumbles.
Most gifted athletes do not make it in professional sports because there are relatively very few jobs in those fields.
I found, as a gifted child, that you can do most things right. You can get the highest test scores and grades, you can earn high accolades, you can graduate with a “great” degree from a respected university, you can follow all the advice of profs and advisors… And still 99.8% of companies do not even bother responding to your handwritten resume.
As opportunity dwindles, the western system will naturally produce more unemployed losers like myself.
Why would you expect them to bother reading a handwritten resume?
Sending a handwritten resume tells them that you haven’t mastered the most basic skills they’d expect from an employee.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I used “handwritten” but I really meant “handcrafted”. This means personalized cover letter, customized resume with keywords, and no AI assistance.
All typed, of course, not handwritten.
I also submitted thousands of AI-generated resumes, but I don’t really count those, they are slop.
I apologize as well. I jumped to a conclusion and responded too quickly.
I assume they meant that they composed the resume themselves vs a chatbot spit it out for them
They might mean human written, not AI generated
I apologized.
I honestly don’t know why I jumped to the conclusion that it was in cursive.
I was one of the “gifted” kids. Went to the special school and everything. And I am. Gifted at taking tests and collecting information.
What humbled me was getting into adulthood and realizing how little that counted for anything. My organization skills were atrocious. My creativity is virtually non-existent. It has been the biggest struggle of my life just being able to keep my life together without some huge issue that came from me failing to address a small, easily handled issue.
It’s not burnout. And if there’s mental illness, it’s undiagnosed ADD or Executive Dysfunction. I just realized I wasn’t that special once I left school.
I can absolutely crush a written test (and only, written) though, so that’s… great.
People don’t seem to realise how many young athletes bodies professional sports teams burn through.
Oh no, my knees told me that at 30
Is it 11?
Maybe neither are wrong, and as a society we also subject children to physically dangerous sports that can cause lifelong injuries. Both suck, and not being able to do something because of illness or hardship is painful to accept.
It’s also indicative of problems in the ways it’s acceptable to teach and raise children: their self worth as humans shouldn’t be predicated on how well they perform, they shouldn’t be subjected to intense pressure to achieve academically and/or athletically, and the illnesses/injuries they encountered as a result of these pressures should have been treated preventatively instead of reactively.
At least the injury probably wasn’t the jock’s fault. I got no one but me to blame for going nowhere with my life.
That’s… some pretty blantant disordered thinking.
A huge chunk of life is things outside of your control. You only have control over how you react to those things.
Beyond that, if you got yourself into a mess, you can get yourself out. Any time where you’re only fighting against yourself is a time where the odds are better in your favor than usual.
It’s will draining work to fight yourself into a better state, can be soul crushing, and it sure as hell isn’t fucking easy, but it is possible.
Self-care isn’t always giving yourself grace to fail, but it’s also not just beating yourself up for past failures. Survival is a perfectly ok goal. Then attempt for comfort and vague happiness. Then maybe you should consider trying to “make something of yourself”.
Very few of our names will live on past the people immediately surrounding us. That can be freeing if you can frame it the right way. Very few “make it”. Most just “get by”, and that’s fine.
I can absolutely spin myself as both; although while I have some legit sportsball bragging rights I’m under no illusions I was going to ever play above maybe D2 college level.
The burnout gifted kid weed use sure helps with my knee pain during the winter though.
You never had the makings of a varsity athlete.
While that’s not the nicest way to say it, I think accepting that is a huge part of growing up, IMO.
I am intelligent, and I am skilled in some things that are incredibly difficult to others such that those things are almost effortless to me. But I’m not the best. I’m definitely not the most intelligent by any fucking metric. There’s tons of people more skilled than me in what I’m good at. There’s countless more skilled than me in general (not just in my skillset), and even more than that skilled at what I’m not skilled at.
And that’s ok. I’m good enough.
The world is complicated, and the story that the most skilled always rise to the top, that so many gifted children hold onto through their youth, isn’t universally true. That can be depressing, but what I find important is this: There are countless people less skilled than you who were and are able to find a place to fit and a way to make it, and you never know when you’re going to find someone better than you that forces you to re-evaluate just how good you actually are at something. Take those as opportunities to learn.
Just be you. You can find a way to make it.
You don’t have to be the best. Not being the best doesn’t mean you aren’t applying yourself or working hard enough. The world isn’t separated into the categories of only first place and losers.
Good perspective, I agree.
I should also clarify (which maybe I should have done in my comment above) that I was just referencing a snarky quote from The Sopranos, not a targeted jab at OP or anyone else in particular.
In The Sopranos, it’s used to belittle the main character Tony and comes from his uncle Junior. Tony was supposedly a good athlete in his youth, but had too many missteps to be great. So his only path in life became having to follow in his family’s footsteps with the mob. Pro sports could have been an out for him, but he never had the chance. Uncle Junior, then the most senior member of the crime family, was being gradually outmaneuvered by Tony in a series of power grabs, but he jabbed his nephew with that petty remark as a reminder that he could never become anything other than what he is, and Tony hates that.
Nice! Sopranos reference!
This reminds me of that time I was in a diner and
Pro is a very specific thing too. There’s not really an equivalent for computer science because pro is so competitive that it’s only like the top 0.1% of players that are skilled at high school level. It’s not a good comparison.
I manage 50 staff every day.
A few of them are rockstars at what we do. Most are just “Also Ran” and you know what… A crew of people who arent amazing at their jobs doing their best get the job done every day.
Yep - can’t just celebrate the rockstars, the plodders and in-betweens are amazing too!
All part of the different strengths we all have. Lord knows, someone’s got to not care enough to ‘clean the toilets’ (in whatever context a team deals with)
Kind of a disgusting sentiment, not gonna lie.
