In so far as youngsters are concerned, people sometimes talk of their learning curve. You know, boys and girls are generally supposed to master certain skills by a certain age. If one of them has mastered some of those skills faster than others, they’re said to be ahead of their learning curve, i.e. they have arrived ahead of schedule, so to speak. In other words, they’re clever and smart. On the other end of the spectrum, if certain students fail to master those skills in a timely fashion, they’re described as behind the curve. Again, if likened to the completion of a project, they’re behind schedule. Or, in the words of the family doctor in David Copperfield, they are “progressing slowly”.
In the top example, therefore, “he” is considered smart because he’s “way ahead of the curve” for his age group. Put in another way, he’s much better than other boys and girls of his age because he can accomplish tasks others cannot.
Society, the society most of us generally live at any rate, usually considers fast as better than slow. That’s just the peculiar human way of looking at things. In nature, there’s nothing wrong with being slow. Snails are slow, for example, and they never appear to fail to get things done. Dolphins are sleek and fast, and that’s fine too, of course.
Humans, for all the trouble they have, tend to favor the yang at the expense of the yin. They think fast is better and, for one thing, some parents cannot wait for their children to grow up. For another, they think bigger is better, which probably explains why a lot of people always seem to wind up with bigger problems than before.
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