Last year I read/listened to 70 books. Across all those words, paragraphs, and pages were several similar themes. Seeing patterns across so many books gave me a sense of what the most important concepts to learn are, one of which is the willingness to be misunderstood.
Everyone who does anything on a higher level feels isolation and experiences being misunderstood for long periods of time.
What primed me to the concept of high achievers being misunderstood was a blog post from Sebastian Marshall called The Million Dollar Question. Why don’t peopleĀ capitalizeĀ on big opportunities in front of them? His conclusion in the long and beautifully written piece is this:
I’ve done a lot and I’m really just getting started. But the more you do, the further away you get from being understood, from the joys of normal life, from being understood by your neighbors and backing each other up and living together harmoniously.
I cried for the first time in three years when I realized it.
The million dollar question… why don’t people take the large opportunities in front of them? Why don’t they allow their dreams to become realities?
Because it means you won’t be understood. And we need to be understood, fundamentally, it’s so important to us.
I’ve had this post half written in draft form for a while. Just last night I came across this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self Reliance:
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
There are endless examples of people in the book Mastery who are misunderstood. People who are the best in the world at what they do weren’t born with that talent. They spent years in deep practice, which often didn’t make sense to the outsiders only seeing a small snippet of their life as opposed to the long arc of the journey.
The catch is that just because you are misunderstood, it doesn’t mean you’re on the path to something great. But to do anything at a higher level, generally means that many people won’t understand you along with the way and there will be some feeling of isolation. There are plenty examples of people being misunderstood who went on to great things. Here’s an example of the opposite, someone who was misunderstood but didn’t create a revolution, at least I assume. I haven’t seen anyone skipping this decade.
People who are the best in the world at what they do were misunderstood in their journey to get there, but simply being misunderstood doesn’t mean you’re on the right path.