Know Your Lane

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Earlier this year, a friend of mine was rudely berated online.  It had to do with my friend’s avocation.  The person who attacked him was educated in the field and considers himself a professional.  The attack, using no profanity, was personal, slanderous, and totally uncalled for.  The administrator of the site on which this happened deleted the offensive post within an hour of it being posted. 

My friend had called me to tell of the incident.  He read the post to me and stated, “I am very well aware of what lane I’m in.  I know my place and try not to pretend to be anything I am not.” 

No matter what your field of endeavor is, there is a distribution of skill and expertise within that field.  For most of us, there are always people doing better and worse at whatever it is you do or like to do.  For the overwhelming majority of us, it is a simple fact that there are always more talented people and less talented people working in your chosen field.  Using my friend's analogy, there are always people in the faster lanes and the slower lanes than yours.  It matters not if your field is business, fine arts, sports, mathematics, writing, jurisprudence, music, history, acting, engineering, medicine, or whatever the field.  Even in each of these fields there are so many sub=fields and categories where people earn a living at or are otherwise engaged in the endeavor as a serious habit.   Consider sports, there are countless numbers of sports from the lifelong sports of golf and tennis to those reserved for the youth such as football and rugby.  There is weightlifting and curling, water skiing and marksmanship, horse racing and horseshoes; the list is seemingly endless.  The same applies to music.  There is classical, folk, jazz, pop, hip hop and more, which can then be broken down further by geography.  Mathematics?  At the highest levels, people specialize in many specific kinds of algebra, topology, number theory, or analysis.

People devote themselves to their vocations or avocations with different degrees of vigor.  People are blessed with a wide range of natural, innate, talent for what they choose to do.  Very few people become well-known and well-regarded.  Even fewer become renowned.  Sometimes this positive notoriety has less to do with training and talent than it has to do with self-promotion/marketing and persistence.  There is a wide range to these various dimensions and the correlations between them are, in my view, fuzzier than most people think.

To make this all more complicated and messier, basically making it more human, we layer on top of all this personality types and egos.  Security/Insecurity, contentment/envy, and believing you are greater or worse than you really influence how you will treat people in your chosen field.  Have you grossly underachieved in your chosen field versus your expectations?  You may still act as if you are a peer to the best in the field and they may politely tolerate you.  You may lord your talent and skills over those who you perceive as lesser than yourself.  Somehow making others feel bad makes you feel better.  This is the “for me to be a success, you need to fail… and I will help you do so” mindset.

Is everything a zero-sum game?  To some degree yes, and, for me, to a larger degree no.

Perhaps, you are content with where you are.  You are happy in your lane.  You admire and appreciate those in the faster lanes, the passing lanes, the "excelling as you wish you might" lane.  You are kind, encouraging, and actually help those who aspire to be in your lane.  This is the “come on, let’s all strive to be better, help each other to do so, and thus make the whole discipline better” mindset.

Between these two extreme mindsets lie the vast majority who just want to do what they do and not be harassed by the overbearing, ego-driven, I win-you lose mindset.  Certainly, in this mindset, there are driven overbearing leaders, e.g. Steve Jobs, that push everyone to achieve more than they thought they were capable of.  They might not be appreciated in the heat of battle, but much more so years later when reflecting back on your accomplishments.

In every profession, in every vocation and avocation, these mindsets exist at close to the same proportions.   

So, know your lane and mindset. 

At the same time, there is no reason you shouldn’t aspire, strive, and work to change to a faster lane and to improve your mindset.