Where are you sitting?

In a recent conversation with a gentleman I met, we were discussing the expectations we have for our children when they go to college.  He related the advice that his older brothers gave him when he went to college.  They told him, "When you are sitting in a large lecture hall, sit directly in the middle.  Then, look to your left.  Those people are smarter than you.  Then look to your right.  Those people are dumber than you.  Get used to that, and you'll be happy."
My first reaction was, wow, what an amazing acceptance of a life of mediocrity.   Here's a person who will never aspire to be better than they think they are, and will muddle through life accepting whatever comes along as "good enough".  What a loser.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is actually some wisdom in what he told me.  I think that one of the most important character traits that we can have is self-awareness.  It's extremely important to know who you are, where you are in your life, what you like, what you dislike, and where you want to be in the future.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think we have to live our lives according to some pre-defined plan.  And we certainly don't want to spend so much time "finding ourselves" that we don't actually live life.  Also, I think the big flaw in this guy's philosophy was that he chose his seat before he ever looked around to see where he was and who was around him.
 Just asking the question, "who am I?" is what leads us to freedom.  I owe a great intellectual and philosophical debt to my college sophomore roommate who challenged me with the question, "you should question what you believe."  It was a simple statement, but it changed my perspective on how I understood who I was and what my place is in the world.  The question was posed to me in the context of a discussion of religion (I grew up in an area where there was a church on every corner, and that shaped my world view), but it could apply to any type of belief.
To go back to the "going to college" example, I graduated high school at the top of my class.  I had always been "the smartest kid in the class", so my graduation ranking didn't surprise me.  In college, I realized that I was swimming in a bigger pond.  I was competing with students from all around the world.  I no longer had an expectation to be at the top of my class, but I certainly wanted to do as well as I could.  I graduated 7th out of 512 in my class.  While not the very top, I was pretty happy with my place.  Grad school was a completely different picture.  I knew that I was in an even more elite group, and I couldn't expect to be at the same level.  I was aware of my capabilities, and I set my expectations accordingly.  In many ways, getting a Ph.D. is a pass/fail proposition, and that was a good thing for me.   I worked hard, I did my best, and I passed, but I realized that there were a lot of other people there who were much brighter than I was.  Nevertheless, I was proud of my accomplishment, and I could say that I was successful at what I tried to achieve.
Throughout my life, I've traveled some paths that could be considered quite conventional and some that were quite unconventional.  Along the way, I always tried to understand who I was, what I was doing, and where I was going.
As another example, there are some things in my life that others would label as failures.  For a while, I worked as a research scientist.  This is a faculty position at a university which has an expectation for promotion to higher levels.  However, if you don't get promoted, you lose your job.  When promotion time came along, I realized that I hadn't done what was needed to get promoted, and my chances of promotion were slim or none.  One of my responsibilities was to manage research projects in addition to the normal tasks of doing research, publishing, getting funding, etc.  I felt the management part was more important to the bigger project and more interesting to me, so this is what I spent my time on, to the detriment of the other areas.  Promotion is based on those other areas, not on project management.  So I changed jobs and removed myself from consideration.  Looking back on this, I don't consider this a failure in any way.  At each point during that time, I made decisions carefully and deliberately with the understanding of what I wanted and what was important to me.  The fact that this lead to a different path than was planned doesn't bother me.
In the bigger scheme of things, being aware of who and what we are has an impact on the decisions we make with respect to politics, the environment, technology, population growth, and the future we want this world to have.  The name of this blog and Carl Sagan's quote that I took it from are perfect examples of being self-aware with respect to our place in the universe.   It doesn't represent resignation to a fate, but it says, this is the lecture room I find myself in, this is who I am, and this is where I choose to sit.