Gai: Had I worked harder when I was little, I could have been an astronaut. If everyone else thought the same, our science would have been so advanced we could all be living in space by now. Or, if everyone thought the same, I still couldn’t be an astronaut, because I would still be ordinary, like I am now.
Rabbit: Well, as Jeff Bezos said, people’s brains are just wired differently, they are meant to do different things.
The back story is that Bezos was originally a physics major in college. One time, he had a partial differential equation to solve. But despite his best efforts, he just couldn’t solve it. So he asked a friend for help. That friend, who spent just a few moments looking at the problem, told him what the answer was. He showed him how he arrived at the answer by writing like three pages of algebra.
Bezos asked him whether he worked out the equation in his head, but the friend said he solved a similar problem a few years ago and was able to map this problem onto that problem.
That moment made Bezos realize that he should pursue a different career. He said in most occupations, you’re still going to contribute if you’re in the 90th percentile. But in fields like theoretical physics, you have to be one of the top 50 people in the world or you’re really not helping out much.
Gai: Oh really? Without understanding what you have said, you mean I couldn’t be an astronaut in the first place?
Rabbit: Yeah, but what’s wrong with being a gai, Gai? Just be good at what gais do.