Post0429

 The fear of being wrong and of exposing one's faults is a petrifyingly intimidating impediment to greatness. Greatness, as in classic novels read countless number of times by millions of people. As in the stroke of genius that sparks revolutionary ideas and innovations of engineering and science that changed humanity's world view. And, of course, the beautiful proofs and ideas that serve as stepping stones in mathematics in the centuries that follow.

But, I am so acutely aware of my own shortcomings and faults that the ideas that inspire me often lose their greatness before I even begin working on them. Ideas that I think to be revolutionary or profound crumble under scrutiny and reveal themselves to be loosely compacted paper tigers that have been thought centuries before my birth. In junior year of high school, I worked on a project in which I built a tool that uses DNA sequences to build a phylogenetic tree. I thought my solution was brilliant, but I realize now that there was nothing innovative about what I did. It was fun though, until I realized that I had been working on a bunch of unoriginal crap. Ideas and engineering creations that seemed brilliant turn no heads of more brilliant minds. Critics will remain critical and will often be correct in their criticisms. But critics have their limits too; there is hardly anybody that looks more stupid than an unimpressed critic amongst a crowd giving a standing ovation. A chess move that I believe to be a fails under the vastly superior computational ability of a computer. I avoid speaking to a beautiful girl out of that fear that I am inadequately prepared or incompetent as of yet to speak to her. I think I'll spend some more time making myself a better, more hardworking, more compassionate person, and then come back to talk to her. And, undoubtedly, our criticisms hold truth; we know when we tell a lie or when we don't really know what we are talking about. We feel jealousy when we see someone stronger than us or smarter than us or more mature than us because we realize our own shortcomings. And, undoubtedly, listening to this voice is crucial--by being our own self's harshest critic, we grow. But, at what threshold do we decide to be good enough?

Life also ends at some point. People die. Books are left unfinished. Work is left incomplete. Tragedies occur that inhibit us from dedicating our full attention to the things we want. Because of our own flawed nature, we indubitably succumb to the weakness in our soul that compels us towards evil. Is it ever possible to achieve greatness in all its totality? We represent the limit of greatness at its infinite extreme as deities. I think there is an element of human consciousness that (correctly) ascribes a power relationship between ; this allows us to realize and correct our flaws. Maybe I talk too much about myself with friends and I need to shut up more to make people like me. Maybe I need to stand up for myself more and say what I think. Maybe I need to stop resorting to sarcasm and ridicule as a proxy for arguments. Life ends at some point, and no one who lives will be perfect when he or she dies. Sometimes it is the dread of our shortcomings that pushes us further down, away from the ideals that we strive towards and seek inspiration within. Maybe we could set goals for ourselves and maybe that is exactly what we should be doing.

Books come packaged together cohesively, beautifully, as though they occupy a seat beside nature's own inherent beauty. Paintings and masterpieces of artwork are glorified in museums. Great people are immortalized through statues capturing the essence of their personage that inspires so many. And attempts to reach greatness almost always result in miserable failure and immense frustration. Perhaps the point isn't that attempting to be great is fun; I think it isn't most of the time. What direction should one even begin to explore? There's always the possibility of the direction being a blind alley and if one travels too far down that blind alley, that person may have lost their time and work on the theory without anything to show for it. In Carl Jung's autobiography, Jung shares Sigmund Freud's obsession with a theory he developed that Jung believes to be incorrect. Perhaps the point is only that attempting to be great is everyone's duty that must be discovered on one's own, at the expense of clarity or happiness.

Fortunately, though, the trajectories of greatness and happiness often coincide. It's so inspiring to watch the mechanical machine in "The Imitation Game" and to imagine how the creation process must have been like from hours and hours of ideation to design and usage. It also happens that the tool Turing built was immensely useful in World War II. I read that Feynman often worked on projects simply because they were fun, rather than merely useful. I can think of many things in my life that are useful and necessary but not particularly inspiring or fun, such as history notes. But it is part of my duty to take history notes. Depression can often steal away from someone the very essence or beauty of something. I once heard Mikhaila Peterson, daughter of the psychologist Jordan Peterson, discuss how severe depression removes joy from even the most fundamentally pleasant things in life, such as colors or music. People go insane and lose their ability to logically reason. There was a psychologist, maybe Nietzsche, who had a brilliant mind but then went mentally crazy and became a lunatic. I can think of no guarantees that life poses other than the presence of one's consciousness.

And then, there is the problem of ego. In the workplace, people have professional standards to uphold and personal reputations to defend. Fear or ignorance often inhibits people from saying what they think or developing their opinions. They are afraid to be a novice at something because they think it improper to admit their ignorance; and thus, they remain confined within their domain of expertise like a scared snail within its hard outer shell.

Another issue is that being great is hard. Discipline is required. It is required to endure unforgivingly frustrating periods of no or low progress. And, there is the possibility of something very, very bad happening. Centuries past and in particular the past century has shown that humans are capable of doing very horrible, horrific things to each other.

Aside (discussion of the justifications of horrific actions): Depriving each other of life in the most brutal ways possible and treating each other like vermin. Humans still do very horrible things like killing animals for food and waging war against each other. Actually, I'm not so sure these two things are horrible. Killing animals for food is justified because, well, we're humans and we can do whatever we want. What other justification is needed? (I hope I won't regret writing the last two sentences) As for war, what is war but a means to determine who gets the final say? Why does war need to be justified? Why do the horrific actions of the past need to be justified at all? Humans and animals simply do as they please and if conflict ensues, they can choose to negotiate with one another, fight against one another, or each can submit to the other.

There must be a reason why a game like Minecraft is so popular. One can build, create and quickly reap the benefits of creation and distruction in a simple world where the rules are clear, but where there is so much room for creativity. The real world is uglier. Generations have built rules upon rules upon rules and layed foundation after foundation for the next generations. Revolutionary temptations arise and one may wish to extricate the entire goddamn system and supplant it with something newer and better built from the ground up, where the world runs more smoothly and things aren't so complicated.

How can one achieve greatness in a world with a growing number of like-minded and like-intentioned individuals like oneself, who are all attempting to make their way to new heights and achieve a level of greatness unlike any other? The book "12 Rules for Life" advocates pursuing one's goals individually and without worrying about one's comparison to others. Clearly, the answer is not to stop trying and to let oneself go. It's clear that if one does so, that only bad and undesirable results await. But it's not so easy to continue working hard, because no positive result is guaranteed.

Movies often make the path to greatness very inspiring. A three minute montage can transform an amateur overweight boxer into a competent professional heavyweight contender. Movies can distill the complete and uncertain journey of the building of a tool into scenes lasting a fraction of an hour. In some episode of iCarly, Spencer buys a replica prop of a space shuttle after watching a science fiction movie involving that vehicle. But he quickly realizes that the prop quickly loses its glory when presented to him before his own eyes. So, maybe things can be deceptively inspiring and we ought to choose what is and isn't worth pursuing.

And then is the idea described in the early pages of "The Weil Conjectures" by Karen Olsson that good things in life come too late. One high school summer, by the time I had plenty of great ideas about what I wanted to do that summer, the summer was nearly over.

Another uncomfortable aspect of achieving greatness is sacrificing. During finals week, I sacrifice my entertainment in order to spend more time studying, despite my preference to not give up anything. When my parents asked my to gain weight, I sacrificed the comfort of living in a slim body to attain the approval of my family and doctor, which I uphold and think I should continue to strive to uphold to a reasonable extent. However, the last four words of my previous sentence leave a world of a ambiguity to be made precise. The idea of sacrifice may be fundamental to human nature. In the Bible, God arbitrarily demands Abraham to kill his son.