EPT Essay on Mead

     The quality we celebrate  or admire in people of is the people with the highest grades, most attractive, or most likely to succeed. We never tend to admire others for the things they do such as having talent with singing, dancing, drawing, or the person that works hard the most. Margaret Mead said “we tend to regard the success of people close at hand, within our own small group, as a threat”. This statement means that people who have talent in our own groups (classmates for example) we feel threatened or jealous of their talent.

   My question is what do you think about this argument? Do you think we tend to admire people that are celebrities or sport stars or singers as long as they are famous, or not in our group? I think it is true that we do admire people that are celebrities or sports stars, now why do we do this? Why do we admire them but not in our group? Perhaps because we think they have more talent compared to our own group, and most likely we admire them more because we think they have more talent compared to our own group and most likely we admire them more because they are famous! If somebody in our school was a pro at basketball and had a basketball game, people would love to come see the guy the play, but if it was Angelina Julie people would rather see her than the professional basketball player at our school. This happens because she’s famous, she’s attractive, and maybe because they she has a good heart, on the other hand they don’t know that the basketball player has a good heart, and maybe the basketball player isn't attractive. We can make a change to how we should admire people that are not famous.

    People who have talent in our own groups such as classmates or athletes feel threatened/jealous of their own classmate or the other athletes. We question ourselves why do you feel like this, why are we jealous of others. I wouldn't say I feel threatened by them unless they are trying to compete then yes I would feel threatened by them because you can work so hard in basketball and all that hard work that you did is thrown away because there is another player that is better than you and he doesn't work hard enough he still gets recognized and the other person doesn't, but I do agree that we get jealous of other peoples talent because you tend to work so hard and you feel like you have low standard because you put all your thinking into it, but the people who have talent they just do it, and us students feel jealous because of that.

   

     In addition to this we shouldn't feel jealous or threatened by other groups that have talent, we should believe in ourselves and know that we might not have the talent they have but we always have a way of finding our own.