his brilliance baffles them

The post earlier this week entitled 'You win nothing with kids', struck a chord with a number of readers.

Perhaps the sensitive nature of the topic dictated that the commentary mostly happened through private channels, heh.

I am grateful, however, to Harshal (and I hope he doesn't mind being identified) who reminded me of this one from the Ernest Wooley charachter in J. M. Barrie's 'The Admirable Crichton'

It's appears that GenY over confidence was also a conversation in 1902.

The quote itself is often mis-attributed to Oscar Wilde.

In Wilde's 'Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young (1894)' he declares 'The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything' however the Ernest character in '...Crichton' is widely believed to be a caricature of Wilde's character in'The Importance of Bieng Earnest'.

As I suspected.

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friday diptych: oscar wilde on mediocrity

Doing what you believe is right or doing the thing that will be popular are markedly different.
For a start, the popular thing has already been done many times, that's why it's popular.

And popular ideas are only popular until the new popular thing comes along.
And that's now, popularly, about every five minutes.

Unpopular ideas touch a nerve, they are controversial, go against the grain, they zag.
In fact, unpopularity of an idea is often directly proportionate to it's interestingness.

The problem with doing what's popular, is that nearly everyone else is doing it too.

As it's Friday have an Oscar Wilde diptych for your powerpoints:

'Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered...
...to be popular one must be a mediocrity.'

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