It was over a decade ago, in a graduate-level organic chemistry class, during one of the last quizzes before the final. I was the only undergraduate still hanging on. The other two undergrads who had braved the course with me had dropped out. So it was just me and a room full of grad students.
The problem at the top of the page was a doozy, but the answer clicked for me quicker than I expected. I felt a quiet pride as I wrote it down—one of those rare moments where the hours of past practice pay off in real time.
Then, the professor walked by, glanced at my work, and announced to the entire class: “Rainbough got the first answer right. If she can do it, I expect the rest of you to as well.”
And just like that, the pride I’d felt was gone, replaced by something else—a confusion that took me a long time to fully unpack.
The gut punch of being the wrong kind of excellent
At the time, I couldn’t put words to it, but that moment landed wrong.
I’d grown up believing in meritocracy—the idea that hard work and talent are all it takes to rise to the top. I believed that if I kept seeking out the hard challenges, kept working and persevering, someone would notice. The right person in the right place would see my effort and say, “Look at this brilliance.”
But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, my success became a threat—a way to scare grad students into being better. If the undergrad could figure it out, surely they had no excuse.
Success that might have been celebrated in a grad student wasn’t celebrated in me. It wasn’t proof of merit; it was frightening, and being used as a cudgel to frighten others.
I’ve told this story to people who think I was robbed of something that day—recognition, maybe, or credit where it was due. But I don’t see it that way anymore. Because what I got instead was a question that changed the way I see success entirely.
What if my skill or talent in that moment could be the bar—not the high bar, but the baseline?
I didn’t get good at chemistry problems because of some innate, extraordinary talent. I wasn’t born knowing how to solve problems that left others stumped. What I had was a foundation built by a remarkable study group.
For a year before stepping into that graduate-level class, I’d been part of a group that worked through tough problems together, taught each other, and learned as a team. We leaned on each other, and the collective effort made us all stronger.
The professor in that class even commented after the first test: she’d never seen a class do so well. There wasn’t the usual bell curve—almost everyone got a B or higher. It wasn’t magic or raw genius. It was the product of a system where people helped each other rise.
So I started to wonder: What if my success wasn’t meant to be exceptional? What if it could be the norm?
Sharing the playbook
That question flipped everything I thought I knew about talent and merit on its head. What if the goal isn’t to be extraordinary, but to make success more accessible? What if the real power lies in sharing what we’ve learned, in breaking down the hard parts, and in pulling back the curtain on the tricks, stumbles, and lessons along the way?
Too often, we cocoon our talents, hiding them like rare treasures, as if the act of sharing would somehow diminish them. But that’s not how it works.
When we share openly, when we let others learn from our missteps and lean on our strengths, we create the room for growth and for our classmates or teammates to lean into the struggle of learning hard skills, and all the turmoil that can happen along the way. In that kind of environment, success stops being about who’s exceptional and starts being about what’s possible. Teaching each other becomes its own path to mastery and to excelling.
And so excellence stops being about the exceptional folks cocooned in piles of books, under headphones, and behind gallons of coffee. It becomes a team sport where every pass, every assist, and every shared insight contributes to the win.
I’m not saying everyone will achieve the same results. But I believe anyone can excel when they’re given the right support, the right tools, and an environment where they feel safe if they happen to stumble while learning really challenging skills. And even more importantly, where they get comfortable teaching and learning from each other.
And that’s the bigger prize—not being the lone standout, but creating a culture where success isn’t a rarity. It’s the standard.