Skip to main content

Mediocrity

A conversation I often have with J is about mediocrity - and how it can be a fair amount of effort to make it through life being mediocre. I encourage her to find her passion and work to excel in it - a much harder thing to do than being lulled into a false sense of comfort by natural abilities. Comes a time when coasting on innate talent will no longer be possible and if hardwork does not come naturally by then, things become difficult.

In my experience, mediocrity is the place where talent and passion meet lack of directed effort. So easy to assume when you have natural gifts, success will take care of itself and so often that turns out not to be the case. I had the privilege of growing up with a few precocious kids - they made everything the rest of us struggled with appear effortless. We were in awe of how they were able to make connections where we found none, ask questions that we would never know to ask and generally walk on water.

Yet some of the most successful among my childhood friends were considered the "average" kids. But what set them apart from the rest of the averages was their determination to succeed. They were not okay to remain mediocre and were willing to work their way out of that cohort - and so they did.

This very candid article about what it takes to be mediocre and is another way of thinking about it - though I am not sure I agree with the author's conclusion :

Being mediocre doesn’t mean you won’t change the world. It means being honest with yourself and the people around you. And being honest at every level is really the most effective habit of all if you want to have massive success

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques