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Genius, ordinary people,

and psychopath
Published on January 5, 2022
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Aries Cheng
1 article
Project Management Associate at Alfa Chemistry

I suddenly caught a flash of insight and realized that a bunch of

fragments I observed in my daily life were related and fell together. I
try to grasp them as a whole from different phenomena or diverse and
disparate patterns of behavior. I can feel that there is a root cause that
can link them together. "The simultaneous realization of a multitude of
disparate phenomena (Jordan Peterson, n.d.)." I got this excited feeling
of illumination and see lots of possibilities. And I want to connect this
simple cause, which is abstracted from the mundane, with specific
cases to help myself and you guys understand my world.

So Everyone, welcome to my world. And let us dive into my world.

From my point of view, there is some sort of balance that existed and
sustain in our mother nature. I gained this kind of inspiration from
many trivia and mundane pieces of stuff. Well, I have to admit that I am
a very very detailed-oriented person with high sensitivity. I used to lose
the view of the entire picture. This is what we called “不分主次” in
traditional Chinese culture. I know that I have this problem, but
sometimes I just cannot control myself, or let's say while I don't want to

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control myself though I recognized that I actually have the power to

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control myself from going too far away from the main point.

The funniest things always happen. There is often a voice that arises
from my heart that sounds like this: "Aries, u have literally no time to
go over all the lecture slides please just do not focus on those fucking
stupid details. Which, frankly speaking, will have no more than 10%
possibility to be tested by your prof. " However, I still cannot let it go.
Then, later on, I started to reflect on my behavior (自省) and try to
explore the reason why I still chose the way to allow myself to dig too
deep into those details though my gut feeling already told me that I
went too far. Here is the point. I lost the balance. What balance? The
balance between the gist （主旨）and details(细节). Let's extend this
to other phenomena.

Both Genius and psychopaths are extreme cases. When we look at the
Normal distribution in statistics, apparently, they are extremes e.g.,
0.1% and exited at the tails of the distribution. While, this is relative to
the middle of the distribution if we assume this middle part is the
majority, which we often called ordinary people. This is what the social
value system or school educated us when we were kids or students.

But have you ever doubted this definition of "ordinary"?

I know you hate this word when it comes to describing or defining

yourself. You, actually, don't like the world to evaluate or judge you as
an ordinary person. "Ordinary" is the society or the majority uses their
value system to constrain you because they want to make you become
part of the majority and ordinary. How terrific and horrible it is? If you
have your value system underpins your world, I mean, you firmly
believe that you are not the ordinary, then set goals, make strategies,
form plans, deconstruct a big plan into small tasks, create your schedule

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with your own priorities. Then take actions to stick to your schedule
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and complete those small tasks one by one in order and at your own
pace. During this process, you can tell and feel that you are making
some changes to yourself and to the world around you.

From my perspective, geniuses, they are ordinary people like you and
me, but they are just so lucky to find an area that they are passionate
about and work hard to dedicate to it. Also, they are lucky enough
because their loved field is accepted, understood, and valued by the
society/majority. What a tragedy about those psychopaths? They went
too far to the extremes. They lost their balance. They are stuck
somewhere and get lost in hopelessness. They haven't found their way
to connect with the real world or the world of the majority. They may
be extremely talented in some fields but haven't been seen and prized
by the majority-dominated society. While, regarding ordinary people,
we just haven't found the field that we are truly interested in and
passionate about. We are stuck in mundane and start to blame the world
instead of self-awareness, self-reflect, self-correct, and self-improve.
You can choose to try lots of different fields at any time and stop
making excuses that you don't have time. You know that you can have
time. You can find something interesting and play with yourself, then
stick to it and dig deep into it. 

Jump from a big view of the picture (the whole) to a specific point
(the detail) where you are truly loved.

I hope you all the best in the upcoming years and I wish you the very
best in your further endeavors. :)

Published by
Aries Cheng 1 article
Project Management Associate at Alfa Chemistry
Published • 1w

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#selfawareness #ordinary #whole #details #passionate #growingtogether

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Aries Cheng
Project Management Associate at Alfa Chemistry

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