There is always someone better than us. Despite this basic knowledge, we tend to feel egotistic and inferior to others. Others superior to us. Did you ever think that it was just your perception? A bigger following might not necessarily mean that guy/gal is superior. Maybe, people just don’t connect to what you do! Or it might be just that people haven’t heard of you yet. Like that case where we all expected the entire world to know Sachin Tendulkar, the GOD of cricket and realized that not everybody does and reacted to it in an absurd and wild way. Poor queen of tennis!
Not everybody knows everyone and everything. If one thinks that he knows everything, he can be doing nothing but fooling himself. Remember some of our greatest authors and inventors? They were recognized long after they were dead. Real people don’t publicize their work! Or pull people to them and tag them (in the modern world, tagging is the new publicity). If that is being done, that means they are just feeding people with rubbish and making them feel that they are reading some intellectual stuff, which actually isn’t the case. The inferior lot always want to feel that they are intelligent too by reading stuff that is fed to them. And if you are using some fancy vocabulary (colloquialism) just to attract a nonsensical crowd who are self-aware of their shortcomings in terms of language, you have really succeeded in giving them that ego boost of higher comprehension (while they immediately refer to their virtual dictionaries).
Real communication is about reaching the wider audience. And don’t ever feel that you are a step above the linguistically unfortunate, when you keep using words that nobody understands. As already mentioned, that’s fooling yourself. That’s ego. That’s narcissism. Congratulations. You have just turned into a megalomaniac.
Putting a picture of yourself on your blog as if the multiverse knows who you are is just outright stupid! Nobody wants to see you, nobody cares who you are. Just give them the good stuff and they would throng at your doorstep to catch a glimpse of you. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal character, Sherlock Holmes, was so believable that, people after reading the stories, actually visited 221B thinking that he was for real. Now, that’s called real writing. If you do things for fame, then forget it. Oscar Wilde was a prolific gay writer who ended up dying in utter poverty. Nikola Tesla, the real inventor of half the things that we use today, also died in utter poverty in a hotel room, talking to an imaginary pigeon.
Humility is just a word these days. It has been restricted to the annuls of age old dictionaries. True, a sense of achievement is always advised, but after sometime, nobody cares! Decline of intellect factor? That is the last thing one could ever imagine. It’s like elephants are flying! Knowledge is an ocean that has no coast! When you can’t even see land, how can you assume that you have traversed the world?
There was this question on the Q&A platform QUORA recently about how one guy felt he was really intelligent and that he just couldn’t sit among the dumber class. The answers to that question were absolutely fabulous and remind us of the long forgotten word – ‘HUMILITY’. True, it is agreed that not everyone is bestowed with superior intellect and resources. The least that we can do is join hands and educate them. Share what you have learned. Wouldn’t that give you a real sense of satisfaction rather than bloating up with ego? Organizations and commissions around the world are calling for sharing and collaboration while we still want to be selfish and protect our hard earned knowledge! What use is it to us after we kick the bucket? Rather, live on forever as people talk about how you helped them succeed in life!
Be proud to be a human. A loving human.
It’s not decline of intellect! It’s decline of empathy!
A Visionarywriter Feature 