Again thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't know if I got my point across that well. Perhaps not surprising as I deliberately chose a provocative word "Mediocre". It is a derogatory way of saying "average". Nobody wants to be mediocre. It invokes the feeling and associations towards having no ambition. Aiming low etc.

But I was trying to put a spin on this idea, perhaps no quite successful, as I get the i impression that you interpret me as saying kind of the opposite of what I intended to say.

Let me clarify: You say your daughter has picked and ambitious education. You ask, should I ask her to choose a simpler path?

Absolutely NOT!!! This is exactly what I tried to argue against. I want people to try the hard stuff. I want people to not be afraid of tackling difficult challenges.

I think the key here is that we frame the issue different. You may want to instill your daughter in the idea of having high goals and ambitions.

My thinking is that many kids often have ambitious goal or ideas, but they are simply too afraid of failing or never getting very good at the hard thing they wanted to pursue.

I want kids to not be afraid of failure. It is not about being a mediocre person or not having ambition, but rather about accepting that ending up mediocre in a challenging field isn't the end of the world.

Don't pick the easy road in life, because you are afraid of ending up mediocre relative to your peers within a hard field.

As you said earlier, if you are the smartest one in the room, then you are in the wrong room. If you want to be the best among your peers, it will mean that you will seek out rooms in which you are smarter than everybody else.

But if you are satisfied with not being the best and the smartest in the room, then you will seek out rooms with real smart people. It may mean that within those particular rooms you will be mediocre/average relative to the others in the room.

What I call mediocre isn't about your performance at an absolute scale. It is about how you perform relative to the environment you choose. The room you chose to be in.