And while I like your logic in your success vs excellence paragraphs, it is sometimes motivating to have external benchmarks. True, having external benchmarks at any point in my education before grade eleven wasn’t all that helpful (most of my peers were slackers and a lot of them weren’t doing so hot on their assignments, but I was a slacker too and I got straight As). But then I went to smart school (aka one of the few high schools in Arkansas with a focus on proving their students with the opportunity to go to college should they choose to do so). At ASMSA, it might have been a little healthier sanity-wise to only base my success/excellence on my own ability and performance and to not compare myself with my peers, but I finally had intellectual peers, and damn it, I was going to use them (that sounds awful, doesn’t it?). Got an A- on that AP Physics C exam? Awesome. Class average was a C? Even better. So-and-so got a regular old A without the minus? God damn it. Must do better. It may not quite parallel the point you were making, but if I hadn’t at least occasionally based my perception of my own success or excellence on that of my peers, I probably would have convinced myself at the end of my junior year that I wasn’t cut out for this shit and gone back to wasting away in public school.

Good point: I don’t mean to suggest that a person’s vast network of other human support is not necessary! We all start in different situations, no one will be presented with the same set of opportunities, some people will get by on sheer dumb luck without expending any effort at all, and nothing would get accomplished ever without the rest of the human population helping out. But taking that as a given: If you put the effort in and still fail, that’s one thing. But if you never put in the effort in the first place? That’s your own fault.

Also, despite the fact that each one of us is ultimately responsible for what we do or don’t accomplish, it’s important to acknowledge that almost nothing can be accomplished without a vast network of support that starts with the people who produce, pick and ship our food (imagine having to farm while in college! No, really, take a full minute!), picks up with our parents, and rolls on past to the people who created and maintain the industries in which we might want to work, the people whose demand supplies our paychecks, the people who built the machines that get us to work, the people who decide whether or not to hire us (based on whatever criteria they happen to apply that day), and, ULTIMATELY ultimately, on the arbitrary nature of the variables that shape the tiny moments immediately before each one of those people makes any given decision. Without other humans, we could accomplish little but collecting food, and that we did accomplish would have little meaning but survival. Other humans are an inextricable part of the living framework that enables our actions and gives them meaning.

The proverbial buck stops at each one of us … but it starts far, far away before it ever gets passed in our direction.

PS: I hope your blog supports my italics.