just do it

[quarrel]

Exceptional people are scary.

Sometimes they're naturally exceptional. Something about them is just plain better than normal. Austin Howard began work on a Ph.D. in Physics at age 16. Andrew Hsu is going for one in neurobiology at the same age.

Then there are the folks who wrench their psyches around hard enough to cause whiplash and find the right mental state to perform at an order of magnitude above the seething masses. Chris Guillebeau is a public speaker, social motivator, international traveler, and aid worker. He spent four years helping a medical drive in Africa when he would nominally have been in college, learning more than he (or likely anyone else) would have learned from classes, then came back to the States and got a Masters anyway. He also wrote a free summary of his techniques and radical philosophy.

Steve Pavlina has a slightly more conventional-looking website but is even less conventionally driven. How driven? In college, he attempted to complete a four-year, two-degree undergraduate program in a year and a half. He claims he had no external encouragement to attempt that, no past experience with that sort of accomplishment, and no past indication of above-average intelligence. He succeeded with a 3.9 GPA. In addition to his coursework, he exercised half an hour every day, slept seven or eight hours every day, ate full healthy meals, spent one full day per week doing nothing but socializing...oh, and worked a full-time 40 hour/week job "on the side" during his last half-year.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if every human on the planet operated like these people. Obviously, it's frightening. Also obviously, I'm sure I have no idea even how to approach visualizing something so alien. I am fairly sure of one thing: regardless of whether everyone actually can freely and voluntarily reach these levels of performance, very few people will actually try. At least for now.