One of my favorite hobbies is asking people random questions. There is no right or wrong answer. I just love hearing my friends’ answers and I enjoy seeing how they would react to the weirdest possibilities. On the top of my head, the last thing I asked was “What if I’m not Jen anymore?”[1]  And this supposedly creepy experience is completed by putting all of my hair on my face while asking that question.

Another one I recently did was this poll. With no other context whatsoever, I asked the question: If you can only be one of the choices, would you rather be rich, influential, good-looking or smart? 

I ran this poll for two days and with only 20 respondents.[2] For this post, let’s just use the percentages so we can pretend that we have a bigger sample size. :p

On the first day, I was quite surprised with the answers. No one has picked ‘rich’ and my initial thought was “Whoa are all my friends already rich? Or maybe they just don’t aspire to be rich? Either way, I’m happy no one really seems to care about money.”

Then, the second day happened and as fast as I concluded that maybe money is not as important, 30% suddenly popped up with this answer and made this option place 2nd on the poll. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either! We all want/need money, no questions about that!

The choice ‘influential’ was an early crowd favorite, along with ‘smart’. Influential (15%) and smart (the 1st at 35%) are both inherent traits and either would be a good pick. Although the public is saying they’d rather choose the latter more than the former. 

I think it can be argued that if you’re influential, you can get your way with people. And if that’s the case, isn’t that already enough on its own to the point where you don’t need to be rich and good-looking? 

I can also say the same for being smart. 

Let’s assume this choice is an equal parts of extreme booksmart AND street-smart kind of smart. If you can get through everything life throws at you because you are really just the right person with all the correct answers, do you still need to be good-looking and influential? Would you crave for all the validation that comes with the two aforementioned? 

Going to ‘good-looking’, with 20% of the votes and my personal choice if I could vote in my own poll[3], I thought it was a bit underrated. 

Have you guys ever heard of the halo effect? When you’re out-of-this-world good-looking, you’re automatically “favored,” in a way by most people, all because of your looks. It seems shallow, but when you’re disadvantaged with everything else—as in, you don’t have money, you’re not that smart nor influential, it becomes a really amazing tool that you can fully utilize. 

And to conclude this survey, if you can even call it that, I just want to say it’s so nice that we get to live in a world where we don’t have to get only one pick. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, we can aspire to be the people we want to be.

This post is just a massive showerthought. Just like doing this poll, I randomly thought to add some words so I can share the results on my blog with you. Hope you found it somewhat interesting![4]

Footnotes:

1. Okay, this is not really the most recent random question I have asked. The most recent is really lewd and my parents read my blog so

2. I don’t have a lot of Twitter followers, okay? Also, please don’t follow me there!

3. 21 respondents, if I can count my own vote!! 21!!! That’s so much better than 20!! Yes! 

4. The last line and the title of this post both allude to TV show Silicon Valley’s Jared’s character when he was very sleep-deprived and trying to make Pied Piper app do a pivot, as a way to save the company in TechCrunch. Also in the same episode are the best minutes of TV comesy sitcom. I won’t spoil it for you! Watch it!