Social Glass Ceilings
October 20, 2005 · Print This Article
If you want to reach your full potential you must constantly evaluate yourself. There are always obstacles. Sometimes it might be a lack of skill, so you go back to school. Sometimes it might be interpersonal skills that you need to develop. However, one of the biggest hurdles is something that doesn’t get much attention. I’m going to call it a social glass ceiling.
Whether we admit it or not, our ideas about what we can accomplish are very much related to the capabilities of the people we are around. It is as if we have an internal bell curve that we use to compare our performance with our peers. If you outperform everyone around you in a certian area, it is going to be difficult to reach your full potential.
I’ve been in classes where I was the top student. I don’t mean I was in the top 10%, I was hands down the best student in the class. It would take me 15 minutes to complete the tests that were scheduled for 60 minutes where most of the other students would run out of time.
In another class I was not the best student. In fact I had serious doubts as to wether or not I could even pass the class. I loved the material, but everyone else seemed so much further ahead than me. They could grasp the concepts easily that required so much effort for me. Halfway through the class I dropped it because I was having such a hard time and took it again the next year. I studied very hard and still ended up with a B with which I was absolutely thrilled.
Of these two classes, the second one pushed me closer to the limits of my potential than the first. That push resulted in greater growth not only in that area of study but in my general abilities. Obviously I did better in the first class from a grade standpoint, but from a personal development standpoint the second class made me push myself further than I had ever been required before.
To really challenge ourselves we must be surrounded with people who are better. It is said that your salary is usually equal to the average the salaries of your 10 closest friends. This is a good general rule for everything–not just finances. The capabilities of our friends average together to create a social glass ceiling. Even if you work hard and break through the ceiling, it will still exert constraints on your progress. If you want to truly push the limits of your potential, the people with whom you interact must be people who significantly challenge you in the areas where you want to excel.
I appreciate this essay because it expresses an issue I’ve often thought about, but have never seen discussed anywhere.
For high school students thinking about college, I’d recommend going to the most selective school you can get into. That may seem obvious, but I’ve met people who are clearly very smart and went to schools that were not the best they could get into. If you see yourself as one of the smart kids in highschool, I believe its better to give up that sense of pride in college.
If as a sophomore you are in the top 10% of your class, you should transfer to a more selective school. The most important thing is not the curriculum (which are remarkably similar everywhere), or the professors, but who you surround yourself with.
I went to Brown, the most selective school I could get into, and I’m glad I did because even though I was a very average Brown student, I was challenged to the hilt. It often means feeling like you’re failing, though. I remember a particulr chemistry exam that I walked out of feeling like I failed. Sure enough, I got a 39, but with the curve it was only a B-.
The difficulty is worth it, as it is unlikely that you will get a chance professionally to be totally surrouned by peers who will help you grow like this.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I was talking with some professors at Harvard who were talking about using the internet for classes. They were mentioning the need for protecting the students and giving them a safe environment to fail. They pointed out that many of the incoming students had never failed in their entire life–getting a B could be devastating. The point was that students were being pushed to new levels of what they were capable of and that the university needed to take care to protect the privacy of the classroom.
I think we spend too much time trying to avoid situations where we might fail instead of seeking out experiences that stretch us enough that failure is a real option. If it wasn’t for grade inflation, students should try to find a school where their best work results in a C average. That means they have plenty of room for improvement and still have the realistic possibility of failure.
Executive Intelligence , by Justin Menkes, provides more information on the idea that stars do better when they’re surrounded by other stars. In addition, Menkes’ research found that despite the faults of IQ testing, IQ is a better predictor of job performance than “past behavior descriptors” or “emotional intelligence.”