Please cast your vote

[mini]

Ladies and gentlemen,

I'm doing a personal research of preferences between professions (obviously this is a web publisher so the people who'll vote here would be at least an IT literate) .

Would you rather be:

The King of the Losers OR The loser of the elite?

and please provide me with your reasons too on your choice.

Thank you for taking a moment to vote.

[Sean]

Depends on what you mean by elite and loser.

If you just mean like social status, I don't think I'd like to be either.

If you mean like I'm on a specific "path" to a specific goal (building a business, learning a skill, etc.) and I can either associate with people behind me on that "path" or ahead of me, I'd rather gain from the knowledge/experience of the people ahead of me, while seeming like a newb to them, than be the king of the newbs for vanity's sake.

I'm not a particularly social person though.

[Sagewing]

Hard question - I am not a loser, nor am I elite.

[Fender963]

Hard question and fairly vague question indeed but if I had to choose I'd say King of the Losers. For example let's say you play college football. Would you rather warm the bench for UT or start for some smaller private school say Rice (I'm from texas if you didnt' guess)? You have much better chance getting seen by a scout if you are actually playing.

[mini]

It is a very vague question - it's up to you to interpret the question.

Sagewing, you have to choose .

[Cutter]

That question some how reminds me of English & Grammer class. Mental masturbation with no foothold in the actual reality.

[Erin]

Is this basically a 'big fish in a little pond or little fish in a big pond' kind of question?

[James]

I'd rather be the loser of the elite. Because the thing about losers is that they drag down the group by doing losery things, and a group will go a lot lower with a lot of losers, and they'll all drag eachother down (you included) and will sink lower and lower and lower. The group would therefore break in the end.

I didn't actually understand the question, so I just came up with a complicated answer.

[r2d2]

I would say it is better to have done the best you can, and maybe not been as good as the other great people, than to be a great loser.

[Chris]

The loser of the elite. You're among the elite, so you do well, but you do worse than your peers, so no one is out there gunning to take you down.

[BGray]

Pretty general question but I'll take a stab.

I figure I'd rather the loser of the Elite

My decision is based on some relativity and assumptions but I'm looking at this one as a class status. (i.e - would you rather be upper middle class or lower upper class)

Assuming a definite line between classes it would always be better at the bottom end of the higher class than the top end of the class below it.

[chromate]

Depends where the king of the losers ends and where the loser of the elite begins. They could be the same thing. So I'll say either

Edit: I thought my answer would be no use to mini. So if I was forced to choose one, I would say: loser of the elite. I'm not interested in people looking up to me (king of the losers) and as a loser of the elite, there's plenty to learn from those above and distance to travel.

King of the losers just seems dead-ended to me.

[Mal]

This assumes elite is superior intelligence and skill... for a job my preference would be The King of the Losers, since this would be far less stressful. I could then concentrate on something I am actually interested in such as a hobby and be equal to those that I team up with. Essentially I would rather get stressed doing something I believe in than doing something that I am simply being paid to do.