Couple weeks ago I came across this term “Lake Wobegon”. At first, I thought nothing of it and dismissed it as if it were an actual name of a lake somewhere in the World. However, instead of moving on and not giving it too much thought, my mind just could not forget the term and something inside my brain kept continuously prodding at me to probe further and find out what exactly was this term – was it a real place somewhere, if yes, where was it and so on a so forth…..So, as my usual routine goes, one weekend I decided to just type in generic search on Google and was bit surprised by what I uncovered through my search.

“Lake Wobegon” as I discovered, is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor as the setting of the “News from Lake Wobegon” segment of the radio program A Prairie Home Companion broadcast from St Paul, Minnesota. It is described as a small rural town in central Minnesota, and is peopled with fictional characters and places (courtesy – Wikipedia).

This program had a weekly monologue by Keillor and he would include recurring closing elements one of which was “Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” (courtesy – Wikipedia).

This element has been particularly studied by psychologists and other experts around the world and in psychology, this notion has been given a specific term “The Lake Wobegon effect”. This effect, as defined by Psychology Wiki and Oxford Reference, is a human tendency to overestimate or to believe that they are above average in intelligence, their achievements and capabilities in relation to others.

Although I had known of the existence of this notion amongst humans for quite sometime, never once did I know that someone had actually coined a term to describe it. And I certainly was glad that my brain kept nagging at me to dig deeper to find out what the term meant as I can certainly see this being more prevalent across many industries. Why does this effect exist/persist amongst us? It is manifested as a result of one’s own perception of self-worth and self -esteem. Often times, people compare themselves to others to gauge how they are doing within their own world – better or worse. More often that not, we see or perceive others based on our own understanding of the world around us. We see everything through our own lens and hence our perception of others reality is limited. When someone else achieves what we have always wanted to achieve, we feel a sense of reaction to it which may be expressed through a range of emotions as being happy, sad, envious, frustrated, etc. If the reaction is coming from a place where we aren’t feeling very positive about other’s achievement, a natural human reaction is to find faults in other’s achievements or their natural being. To hide the fact that we may not have given our 100% to achieve what someone else may have achieved, or we may not necessarily be blessed in the same way with what someone else may naturally be blessed with, we combat our own shortcomings by inflating our self-worth. Hence, we tend to jump on the “Lake Wobegon” train where we push ourselves into believing that everything around us is perfect, and we are actually better than “the other”.

The inverse of this effect could also happen. When you are not self-aware of your emotions, and things in life may not necessarily have worked the way you have wanted them to work, you tend to operate with the “victim mindset” which manifests itself into thoughts such as “Nothing will ever work the right way for me”, or “I am just not good enough to achieve what “the other” has achieved”, or “The only way for me to get this is by depending on that particular source”.

As you can tell, being in either camp is NOT IDEAL! What is of utmost importance is for you to get in tune with your own self, your own reality and the reality of the world around you. Everyone has their own unique talents, skills and potential they can reach. The Almighty has made each and every one of us distinct. Comparing your success or achievements to others is not as helpful of a measure as comparing your progress with your own self. Rather than looking outside to either inflate your ego or feel dejected, the best outlook is for you to self-reflect and determine whether you have made any progress today than you had yesterday! Be HUMBLE with how you see and perceive life around you. It should not be about thinking less of or more of our own self, but rather thinking of ourselves less and focussing on building collaboration and and learning from each other for the betterment of the entire community.

There are multiple examples shared in The Holy Quran that help us understand what does self-inflated ego lead to and it sure isn’t the path we want to go down on. While you can never compare your lives to the lives of the multitude of Prophets that came before us, you can always strive to live a life fulfilled in the right direction!

I will close this post with a quote from Henry Ford:

If there is any 1 secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own!

The moment you get in touch with your own reality, you will be more likely to accept the reality around you and this will propel you to put on a different lens to march towards a better & fulfilling tomorrow!