Sometimes we have trouble accomplishing our goals. We struggle and we fuss; we fight and we worry; we expend tremendous amounts of effort with little to show for it. Instead, we then find ourselves standing in the middle of a mess, no closer to our aims than when we started. And then sometimes, we look up from our disasters and watch as other people seem to productively execute the very same actions that got us nowhere.
While it’s true that the more that we flounder, the more brilliant everyone else can sometimes appear to us by being merely adequate, but it’s also often the case that even our minor errors can make us feel extremely sub-normal. That’s an illusion, of course. Nobody is good at everything, and there are a lot of things that we are able to do easily that other people have trouble with, and vice-versa. But even if it’s a common feeling, the sensation that one might be underdeveloped in a basic skill that our peers seem to have down pat is a particularly nauseating one. It’s one thing to want to stand out from the crowd, but no one wants to stand out because they are inept.
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