“Don’t have a silly sense of superiority or of inferiority.”

This is the phrase that my teacher of the high school I graduated from said. After hearing this phrase, it became my belief. I have never heard such a profound phrase.

When I was 15, I entered the high school and joined its baseball club. Our high-school baseball team is so strong that it have made it into best 8 in the prefecture tournament. We always practiced very hard to break the record. Our manager, my teacher was always in the center.

He gave us hard menus every day, and if he found what gets on his nerves, he became furious easily. It happened many times that we had to persuade him to let us practice because he got angry. Why did he become that? It’s because we didn’t utter a loud in our practice. He got angry. We apologized. He got again. We apologized once more. Only the same repetition. Did we practice baseball for just humoring him? We hated him. Naturally, also I did.

One day, the time that the summer prefecture tournament was coming, we were practicing with limited members who could be chosen as the member of summer tournament. After practicing, we had a meeting with our manager. What he said was this phrase, “Don’t have a silly sense of superiority or of inferiority.”

What did he want to tell us by the phrase? At the time, I thought he sympathized the members who were not chosen. But now, I think it has another meaning. A sense of superiority stops you from maturing more. Once you find the existence of inferiors to you, you’ll be satisfied with your position. And you’ll never step up anymore. A sense of inferiority is also same. Once you recognize your inferiority, you can’t catch up with superiors you think forever.

I thank him very much to give me such an important phrase. The man I hated the most changes into my best teacher.

Please remember that the wrong impression makes you ruined.
Don’t have a silly sense of superiority or of inferiority!