On Being Inadequate

I suspect many of us grew up with ambitious plans. Our heroes after all are not borrowed from the middle echelons of middle management, but sit at the very tops of their respective pyramids. Einsteins, Newtons, Kennedys, Gandhis, Kings. As children, in our most audacious moments, we see ourselves as astronauts, movie stars, and superheroes.

However, we all know that this delusion cannot continue for long. At some point, we must redirect our ambitions downward. We must confess that while there are always deficiencies in circumstance and flaws in opportunity, there are also inadequacies within ourselves. There are lengths to which we cannot run, no matter how hard we might try. Children who dream of being astronauts must inevitably be brought back down to Earth, and there is no better time for this to happen than at the transition point into college.

My own path towards this realization came during my freshman year. I began to realize what “smart” meant, and how high the bar actually stood. I began to see what the heroes I had read about might look like in real life. Michelangelo was 24 years old when he completed his first masterpiece—the Pietà. Steve Jobs was worth more than $100 million by the age of 25. I began to see around me the caliber of person who would go on to be labeled “genius”. I began to appreciate what world-class excellence looked like—and it looked unfamiliar.

In my pre-Harvard life, I had always been able to find refuge in my talents. There were always things I was good—perhaps even the “best”—at, and this partly meant that there were always things for me to do. Harvard however, was the first space in which I met people who were better than me in every conceivable way. People who were better than me at all of the things I valued. People who were not only more intelligent than I was, but who were also more hard-working, more compassionate, more attractive, more athletic, more social, more empathetic, and more self-aware. These were people who were quite simply better at “life” than I was. There were no more excuses; there was no more refuge. Tasks that would take me hours might take them minutes. Insights that I may never reach came easily to these people.

At Harvard we are privileged in that we were able to avoid this harsh truth for so long. Some of us are even so fortunate to be one day in the places we dreamed about as children. But how does one continue to operate under such a realization?

I don't have a solution to this conundrum. But I do think it’s best to move directly into the difficulty rather than skirting around it. I take solace in the works of existentialist philosophy, which urges us to tackle the monolithic responsibilities of life head on. Sartre, in “Existentialism is a Humanism” gives human beings three monolithic responsibilities: First, that we are wholly responsible for everything that happens to us; second, that every action we undertake is simultaneously a prescription to all of humanity; and third, that man is no more than the sum of his actions. What Sartre is doing is giving us a level of unbearable responsibility that has the capacity to crush us, and leave us paralyzed. But if we leap forward and embrace these responsibilities, what he gives us in return is an immense amount of freedom. We become wholly responsible for everything that happens to us and everything we do—both the excellent and the inadequate.

Sartre’s technique of diving forward is useful. Imagine for a moment that you truly are not good enough, and explore the consequences of such a statement. Imagine for a moment that your dreams, whatever they may be, are wholly out of your reach, and that you will never in fact be good enough. What then? For me, entertaining this thought in its entirety is massively liberating. When the burden of being “good enough” is dropped, there is so much more room for life.

As a senior I am fortunate to have come to terms with many of these insecurities, but as a freshmen these were the un-talked about realities that plagued me. In a place that is humid with the weight of constantly needing to be the best there is ego and there is bravado. It means that when the respite of external validation dries up, it can be difficult to breathe.

Instead, tear the fangs off of inadequacy and bring it out of the darkness, and in doing so, create a new, more mature definition of ambition.

I still dream of being an astronaut—but that statement means something else now.

Awais Hussain ’15 is a joint philosophy and physics concentrator in Eliot House.