Don't follow the leader, Be the Leader

Sometimes I like to talk about very abstract topics, and sometimes I like to talk about topics that are grounded in reality. My favorite topics are those abstract topics with seemingly little relevance, but when actively applied and considered in your actions, make all the difference between mediocre and phenomenal. It's those tiny principles, or big ideas, that are actually governing your actions, despite what you've rationalized to yourself. 

Human beings, I like to believe, have the capacity to choose their own actions within a scenario. Social Psychology shows us that most people are predictable, and will make a predictable decision based on their surroundings. There are some who act unpredictably, and it's those people who have either experienced similar conditions and are able to do better than before, or are able to think about the situation and run through a series of sub-scenarios in their head before acting. These last two types of behaviors are what I will focus on, because I think even these behaviors are predictable to a certain degree. 

The people who change the world, historically, are never the people that have the same ideas as everyone else. They have always been people who challenged the status quo, to eventually become the status quo. These are the people who did not claim to want a quiet life, nor did they engage in behavior to suggest to anyone that is what they wanted. The people who changed the world did not talk about the problems of the world, but the solutions to fix those problems. They built the systems (human/machine/digital) that solved the problem that everyone else complained about; but, they did not immediately conjure up the systems from thin air. They learned the technology, and they learned from the people who used the precursors to the technology. They carefully watched and studied, purely out of a deep interest to satisfy their own curiosity (or other motive), until they reached a point where they figured out they could make something better. 

It would be unreasonable to believe that any of these World changing people kept these ideas to themselves. In fact, it shows according to history, that they were all mocked and considered to be wasting their time up until the point of their success. Some people were able to create systems at a young age straight out of college, and others went through a gauntlet of employment and project creation, observing the techniques that work and do not work, before applying it to their own business. Nearly all of these people have a consistent theme of their lives, and it has to do with challenging the status quo, and KNOWING they can do it better. In order to do better though, you need to know what needs to be improved upon (or removed), and that can't be known unless you analyze the subject. This is the reason to discuss these abstract concepts: because it allows multiple perspectives to tackle the subject. Choosing to ignore discussing these abstract subjects is a concession to mediocrity. 

I think many people are convinced of their own mediocrity, rather than of their greatness, because we grow up in a society where we don't feel special. We even recognize that the society tries to treat each person like their special, and it's this observation that conditions us to feel not special, but entitled, to such treatment. It's this conditioned behavior that conditions the mind to follow suit. The mind must justify the conditions in which the body is submitted to, at least, in order to avoid confusion. Any other emotion may follow, but the primary job of the brain is to make sense of the experience, it must satisfy the "why?". As it turns out, this satisfaction of the why, can be conditioned to be accepted with little evidence aside from the approval of authority. As long as you aren't an authority, you don't need to know why, and you don't expect to be held to the standard of knowing, so you avoid knowing at all. It's this perpetuation of mediocrity which our society conditions people to,  even though we know we can do better, we choose not to because no one is holding us to the standard of doing so. So we need to hold ourselves to that higher standard.