Excellence isn’t rewarded because it upsets the system.  In the classroom,the teacher may have motivated children to read a book by building excitement for what happens next. If one enterprising student reads ahead and knows the outcome, it could demotivate others. So she took the lazy way out and punished the achiever instead of finding young Kizmet a more advanced book to read on her own.

They got their consequences later when they screwed up as adults and their parent could not fix it. Their parents did not do them any favors.

Yep. Monkey see, monkey do.

Showtalk said:

Excellence isn’t rewarded because it upsets the system.

Yep.

And then the world ends up mediocre because excellence was discouraged and often punished.

And yet excellence rises like cream to the surface. Bezos. Gates. Zuckerberg. Sports figures, although I can’t think of any right now.

Don't know what proportion is excellence vs what proportion is just a little luck and ruthless winner-take-all getting the upper hand on the competition.

Zuckerberg started out as an opportunist and made something of someone else’s idea.  The real geniuses were the ones who created early popular computing systems.

Showtalk said:

Sucker berg started out as an opportunist and made something of someone else’s idea.

Yep. Like how many others have done. Take credit for the ideas and hard work of others, rake in the dough, use patents and copyrights to separate the others from the fruit of their labors.

Now that was a real typo. I fixed it, LOL.