Wait, you tried your best and failed?
THAT'S GREAT! That's great, great, great news!
First, lemme make a distinction between performance and competence: Competence is your ability to do something and your performance is your actual action. So, competence in this case may be your intelligence, your ability to work hard to get what you want, your ability to reach your goals, your competence at life, whether you're a good person, etc. Your performance was this test and how you did on it. You've correctly identified a major cause of procrastination, which is "if I don't do my best and half-ass it, then my performance won't reflect my competence and my sense of my competence will remain intact and I don't have to go through massive self-reexamination like Chillax is right now". This is an insidious sort of procrastination, because it's not obvious. It's completely dependent on individual ability, and you have to really hit your limits to do it. That means that Rhodes scholar who's at the top institution with top grades may still be below his best ability. That's basically what Will was doing as a janitor in Good Will Hunting.
That's good news for a number of reasons: 1. Your potential isn't limited. Fine, you feel you failed today so you're questioning your competance, but that competence isn't fixed, like your intelligence isn't necessarily fixed (know what improves fluid intelligence? Video games. Excersize can also make you smarter, functionally). It grows with every failure. It's like with excersize: you are supposed to go right to the edge of your muscle's competence and fail. Then, when it grows back, it grows back stronger with a much higher competence!
Think of it this way, if I gave you a test you had trouble with from two years ago, would you be able to do much, much better? That's your competence growing. Next year, you'll be able to ace whatever you're having trouble with today. But there's no fun in just hanging around doing the stuff you already know how to do; you wanna push yourself every year and that's what school does. It pushes you to grow your competence every year.
Until and unless you are willing to fail (a lot), your competence won't grow as quickly as it can. You want to be at the Zone of Proximal Development, where you can barely do this thing.
2. Many people never, ever try their best and figure out where their limits are, they always remain shy of them and shy of not being "good enough" in one small area, cause they can't handle it. Congratulations! You're going through a massive growth period!
3. What you're talking about is your relationship to your own finite-ness. The existentialists talked about this issue. It's sortuva fact of existence and Being. I can't go into more detail about this, but if you're interested, look up the existentialists like Heidegger, Sartre, etc.
Basically, there's some facts of existence: you're going to die, you'll likely get old and feeble, you can never know everything, you're limited and finite, you can try really, really hard and still not get anywhere (story of Cain and Abel), you're likely not tall enough to play NBA, likely not big enough and good enough to play in the NFL, a billion other things, etc. How you relate to these facts of existence is important. You can either choose to Accept them and work with them, or resist them and deny them. Some links on resistence and acceptance:
Awareness and Resistance How to bring The Peace of Non-Resistance into your life now » Personal Development - UrbanMonk.Net The denial and the acceptance of suffering: Compassion, Part 4 » Personal Development - UrbanMonk.Net
The Power of Now is about this, too. I recommend it.
You're doing some serious denying there. You've said it yourself: "In the end perhaps there really is no solution but to accept our mental incompetence, but I just can't accept that." Well, it's not really your mental incompetence, you're likely in the top 10-20% of the world's smartest people anyway, it's all how you look at it. You can look up and say, I'm just not as smart as that guy in Good Will Hunting, or you can look down and say, "you know, I'm doin alright. I am competent enough to be a success at life according to external standards, and at my own standards, and I'm improving all the time. I'm good enough, though I'd like to be better, too". What you're accepting isn't your mental incompetence, you're just accepting how it is, where it is without judgement. It's not good or bad, it is what it is. It's like, I have a certain weight. I can say it's not good enough to be a sumo wrestler, or it's too much to be my ideal weight, but it is what it is...and I can improve!
Sorry about the long post. What you're going through isn't simple. Took me about a year to handle it, and I failed that year of school, so I hope I can help make that a bit easier. You'll still have to read all everything (multiple times), understand it and apply it in your life. Before I finish, here's a bit more from Pavlina talking about being limited and my comments on it:
Quote:
Steve Pavlina recently did the same sort of thing in a recent blog entry called Fanatical About Growth. He wrote:
"The goals that interest me most are the ones that cause me to say to myself, “Wow… I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. This looks pretty damned tough. I’m going to have to push myself to a whole new level in order to make it to the end. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this off.”
"But then I think to myself, “What if I fail? No big deal. At least I’ll know where my limits are. But what if I succeed? How awesome would that be? I’d gain an incredible new reference experience for the rest of my life. I’d have an amazing experience to share with others. And what new challenges might I tackle beyond this one?” That’s the kind of thinking that excites me."
I find this interesting because if I was in the same position, I’d have very different self-talk. It would be more along the lines of, “What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough? I’m not sure I can handle that.” Notice, oddly enough, my self-talk isn’t specific, it’s universal about all of me rather than, say my level of self-discipline, and it doesn’t include anything about being able to improve things, as if failing this once means that’s the end of the game and that’s only as good as I can ever be. That’s the epitome of taking it personally. Additionally, I wanted to point out that I asked “what if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough?” while Pavlina said “I’ll know where my limits are.”
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Your Emotions and How You Think About Them | Mind-Manual
I hope this helps. If you'd like to know more, feel free to ask.