(The Harvard Crimson)

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned since coming to Penn is that I suck. You’d think I’d feel bad about this, but I really don’t mind. Because all of you suck, too.

Seriously, it’s okay. Obviously, we don’t all suck at everything. But I promise you, everybody sucks at something.

I’ve accepted my suckiness, and you should too. While I could probably fill an entire book listing all the things I suck at, let it suffice to say that items one and two are probably “calculus” and “anything involving a kitchen appliance that isn’t the microwave.”

I know you were perfect in high school. I know that you got straight A’s, got fives on all 37 AP exams you took, and got a 2400 on your SATs (even when they only went up to 1600 back then). So did I.

But then we came to college, where being awesome was a little harder than before. And sometimes, no matter how much work you did, you weren’t awesome anymore. I call that “something” Math 103. I was the kid in high school that couldn’t stand anyone that didn’t understand math. But after killing myself in Math all semester at Penn, I just barely pulled off a C+.

Some of you probably think I’m pretty dumb. After all, when I told people I was taking “stupid calculus,” they would reply, “Oh, Math 104?” And I’d have to reveal that I was being killed by a class even lower in the sequence than Math 104.

But sucking at calculus was good for me. I realized that blaming the professor wasn’t going to help, that other people had gotten A’s and (most importantly) that no one is good at everything. I turned my attention to concentrating on what I was good at and what interested me instead of freaking out about not being perfect.

Most people I know had this epiphany freshman year, whether it was caused by a bad grade or not making the athletic team they had expected to walk onto. Once we got knocked off our high horses, we learned to roll with the punches and accepted our suckiness with pride.

The longer it takes to learn this lesson, the worse off you are.

For example: Yifei Chen, a Harvard sophomore who threw a hissy fit via e-mail after not being re-elected to the 2007 editorial board of the Harvard Crimson. I’m not saying His Highness was a bad board member in 2006, but he obviously hasn’t learned that it’s okay to fail sometimes.

Along with learning that nobody’s perfect comes learning to suck with a little grace. At the very least, you learn that calling next year’s editorial board “incompetent” and “undedicated” and resigning in self-righteous rage might be just a tad juvenile.

Holding yourself to a higher standard is great, but you have to be realistic. Don’t beat yourself up for sucking sometimes. Because if nothing else, I can assure you that people who think They’re perfect have no friends. And that sucks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 3:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.