“A good person is great; but an awesome person—they’re on another level. I’m all for tasty sandwiches; but I’d rather have an awesome one. In a Socratic spirit I started wondering what was going on with ‘awesome’ and whether there was anything to gain from a philosophical inquiry into its contemporary significance.”
Thus spake Nick Riggle, the high school dropout and former professional inline skater who happens to hold a PhD in philosophy from NYU, in a recent interview with Scientific American. Riggle’s book, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck, was published last week.
I for one think he’s dead wrong, since he seems to simply be equating awesomeness with extroversion, dooming introverts like me to a lifetime of suckiness. (Which, come to think of it, explains quite a bit.) But then, it’s hard to tell from a short interview. Maybe I should read the book. I mean, that would be the awesome thing to do, right?