that one friend who's good at everything and the genius wall
i just came back from school, the experience was very interesting and i want to write it down. finals is over, and we now have a lot of time for things that were pushed away by tests. that includes free time, reading, and creative projects. it's our second day after finals so i don't know what exactly we're up to, but i think it'll be very interesting. it's kinda connected to learning without fomo that i wanna do, i think i'll write it tomorrow. (i sure have a lot to write after finals) i hope i get to talk a lot. idk why but ppl don't give me opportunities to talk and are angry when i get any.
oh wait actually this is gonna be several events with their own themes, so imma split them into separate posts. here's the first one!
as i said, it's only two days since finals, and i am very proud of my grades. i thought i topped the whole seventh grade, but today it turned out that was not true. i met my friend from piano class who i'll call prodigy cuz she is a prodigy according to me. i asked prodigy how many questions she got wrong for finals, she said two. and i was like 'nooo i got three wrong, you just stole my only chance to top the seventh grade'. but you know what's even cooler? she also practiced piano for the school festival and passed all the interviews during test period, while studying enough to top the whole grade! she said that she was lucky and that she barely studied, but luck is just what supplements the skill and effort one has built for their lifetime. and i think one of the qualities that helps her is that she will focus on anything. like we were in fifth grade when i decided to look on prodigy, we were in different schools but in the same piano class. and whenever i looked at her she was always in her practice room, taking whatever thing she did very seriously. me and my other friends who were all the same age and were preparing to do piano as a major/career were easily distracted compared to her, especially me lol. that's why i'm not taking piano class now and have chosen to go the "normal" path. because of that i have always admired prodigy and thought of her as on the other side of an uncrossable fourdimensional wall1. i told my school best friend (mentioned on previous posts as 26) that, and she said that she thought of me the exact same way i think of prodigy, and that i'm also a great person with potential.
i always thought of people like prodigy as on the other side of a genius wall. people on one side of the genius wall, the non-geniuses, are not good at most things and have to work very hard on one thing to succeed. on the other side of the genius wall are the geniuses, who have talent that isn't enough just to stay on one side, in fact they're better off with being multidisciplinary to develop different skills that help each other. like that one top student of hafs that was in the international linguistics olympiad just before suneung, came back, realized the importance of statistics, and went to the seoul university department of statistics. those people like prodigy who can balance studies and arts, and somehow top both of them.
but does the genius wall actually exist? after all, as i said before, prodigy took everything seriously and practiced a lot. even if prodigy was talented, unless she's very very strawberry(?)2 exceptionally talented, she wouldn't be able to top anything with an attention span and dedication like me(lol), even if she gave up one thing. and western students seem to balance studies and arts and somehow do both of them decently with the burnout rate not higher than korean students' burnout rate of studying. does that mean most people in the west are on the genius side of the wall? maybe it's just our thoughts that we can only do one thing, and that doing another thing will definitely lead to doing the first thing worse. sure, sometimes multitasking is bad, sometimes we need to do things one at a time, but sometimes it seems like an excuse to not challenge ourselves cuz we're not genius enough. sometimes we just gotta do new thing or challenge yourself to do a familiar thing even better, and try to be one of those people on the genius side by breaking that wall.
i think this quote from robert birming's post how winners get lucky is relevant:
Want to be a good skier? Ski more. Want to be a good writer? Write more.
Simple as that. And so hard.
That’s why only a few become winners.
They don’t give up. They keep doing it. They get lucky because they don’t believe in luck.
update 2025-12-20: mason responded to this post
update 2025-12-25: imperfect responded to this post