Labels — who defines it
Labels turn smart people into morons. —this quote taken from the internet, scribe unknown. Hope, I haven't done any contextomy.
Everyone wants to put youib a box based on “what you do”. Generally, most of us want to slap a label on someone, sometimes on ourselves too, without realizing that limits individual potential. On repetition of the labels, our over-receptive mind presumes that to it to be true. And thus limit your potential. A purist may say, that just as the mind perceives what you hear and reinforces, you can reprogram by assuring otherwise. You reassuring and maybe two others saying otherwise, which in most cases is not two, just by common sense, which gets cemented in mind? So I am speaking normal functioning human, in a normal social setting. Not exceptions.
All of us are multifaceted, what comes forth and what is subdued are based on societal influences. Say being a millennial, academic capabilities were considered the most important. Say even if you are exceptional in other areas, you still need to be excelling in your studies. So here we can we have labeled the person as an academic, or studies-driven person, a whole lot of us were that. We never knew by higher school, if the person pursued any of his/her other interests. So what does that gear up the person to be a professional, who would fit into a corporate world? Have known a lot of us who struggle in this mold, a few break free and pursue it at a later stage. Such people who have later, broken free from the lathe machine-driven production, were assumed in our gen to be bohemians. That means the general rules do not apply for them and they weren't following norms too.
These bohemians, although pursuing their area of interest, because of being in the grind before, having missed out on 10000 and thus to be outlier in that field, may have to give up on their youth. As per Malcolm Gladwell discussed in his bestseller, “Outliers“, to become an expert it takes 10000 hours (or approximately 10 years) of deliberate practice.
In recent generations, there are most amicable institutions that encourage the growing generation to be multifaceted, and thus he could be an engineer, flutist, and food baller. He is equipped to be all of it at once, because of the resources available and the time management which he is taught to balance all of it and the importance given to each of the activities is equal, so there is no bonus point to being an engineer, more than the flutist. Or rather, being a flutist, intrigues a larger population than otherwise. Of course the millennials would still ask you, “What do you do?” and expect an engineer or doctor as answer from you, to be in awe of you. To reform our millennial's repute, I am training myself to ask instead “ what do you enjoy doing?”, “ what are you reading now?”, maybe this would ellicit his interests out than his profession, which he practices for a living.
Debunking these labels is a task till some of us swipe out of the face of this land! Or we unlearn for being non-judgemental and may be see a person sans labels.
