Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve been mulling on this for a while and might write something myself. A couple of thoughts.
If you discover you could be doing a lot more good than you currently are, you could have (at least) two reactions: disappointment that you haven’t been doing more in the past and/or excitement that you could do better in the future. Both of these perspectives are valid and it seems you could focus on either one.
For those who, like me, tend to find it quite easy to be disappointed with and hard on themselves, I might help to think “well, the past has happened. There’s nothing you can do about that now. So let’s look to the future.”
The title of this post made me think you were going to talk about something else, which is whether those who aren’t in the top 1% of a given field (I suppose this most naturally applies in academia) have very little impact. I don’t know if this is true—it’s certainly the sort of thing people believe, but it might just be folk wisdom.
It does strike me as true that the people at the top of a field have a disproportionate share of the impact.
What does that imply you should do if you’re not in the top 1% and what to do the most good? Well, maybe you should keep going in your field but maybe you should switch. Depends on context.
A totally separate question is how you should feel if you aren’t one of those people having a huge impact.
I take it I should be trying to do the most good I can do, emphasis on the ‘I’. I can’t be anyone else, so it’s irrelevant, in some important sense, whether or not others do more (or less). The right comparison is between how much you do in your actual life compared to the other lives you could have led. The important bit is that I am trying my best. Nothing more can be asked because nothing more can be given.
Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve been mulling on this for a while and might write something myself. A couple of thoughts.
If you discover you could be doing a lot more good than you currently are, you could have (at least) two reactions: disappointment that you haven’t been doing more in the past and/or excitement that you could do better in the future. Both of these perspectives are valid and it seems you could focus on either one.
For those who, like me, tend to find it quite easy to be disappointed with and hard on themselves, I might help to think “well, the past has happened. There’s nothing you can do about that now. So let’s look to the future.”
The title of this post made me think you were going to talk about something else, which is whether those who aren’t in the top 1% of a given field (I suppose this most naturally applies in academia) have very little impact. I don’t know if this is true—it’s certainly the sort of thing people believe, but it might just be folk wisdom.
It does strike me as true that the people at the top of a field have a disproportionate share of the impact.
What does that imply you should do if you’re not in the top 1% and what to do the most good? Well, maybe you should keep going in your field but maybe you should switch. Depends on context.
A totally separate question is how you should feel if you aren’t one of those people having a huge impact.
I take it I should be trying to do the most good I can do, emphasis on the ‘I’. I can’t be anyone else, so it’s irrelevant, in some important sense, whether or not others do more (or less). The right comparison is between how much you do in your actual life compared to the other lives you could have led. The important bit is that I am trying my best. Nothing more can be asked because nothing more can be given.