When I was younger, I used to see myself as almost something of a 'black sheep' within my family.

I was the one who strayed off of the beaten path. The one who read chemistry and biology and physics instead of studying competition math, like my sister did. The one who went and wrote computer games instead of practicing for mathcounts, amc, so on and so forth. I was the one who disagreed with my parents and didn't always do what they said. I was not the talented, diligent, responsible child that my sister was.

I saw myself as misguided, wandering away from what my family wanted and expected me to be.

But as I got older, I slowly began to realize that this mentality - to question the status quo, to forge one's own path in spite of external guidance - was not quite so different from the principles my parents lived by. There is a certain kind of insight that comes out of the truly self-guided exploration of life. There is strength in the diversification of knowledge, and in many ways I am thankful that I chose to approximate the jack of all trades rather than the master of one. Similarly to myself, my father diverged from solely studying olympiad math when he was in high school, exploring competitive programming and debate. He too did this in defiance of what his parents told him to do.

And maybe, in the world we live in today, it'll prove valuable to be a free thinker, to be a generalist. Maybe we as a society need a bit of stochasticity to nudge ourselves out of the local maximum we call stability.

I'll end with the following quote from Steve Jobs:

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Order is, and always will be, built off of the back of chaos.

tags: life