When Mediocrity Is Okay

You don’t need to be perfect all the time.

Most of the time you don’t even need to be good.

Because putting any effort toward your goal — whatever it is — puts you ahead of the 90%+ of folks who have not.

Only by freeing ourselves of the need to be perfect can we slowly, and honestly, become good.

These thoughts — basic though they are — came to me during my latest review of Medium, where I read two posts — a brilliant satirical short story called “Life-Hacking Isabel,” and a transcript of an interview called “Malcolm Gladwell Wants to Make the World Safe for Mediocrity.”

Aside from being insanely jealous that I hadn’t written “Life-Hacking Isabel” myself, both pieces were a clear reminder of a single, important fact:

Most people are mediocre.

That’s the literal definition of the word — the fat middle — say, the 40%-70%.

And that’s okay.

It’s like noting that 50% of the population is below average.

That’s not mean, or an exaggeration — it’s just…true.

But here are three reasons or scenarios when mediocrity is sometimes actually desirable:

1. When you lose the need to be perfect, you lose your inhibitions. You don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

2. When a baseline understanding is necessary, but you need not be an expert.

Ex. You’re a manager who needs to know enough about product development, engineering, or coding to understand what the technical experts are telling you and make budgetary decisions accordingly.

Here, some knowledge is better than none at all.

3. Mediocrity could signal a cultural shift.

My favorite example of this was Ang Lee’s “gay cowboy film” Brokeback Mountain.

Brokeback Mountain

Despite brilliant performances from its cast of Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams, the movie’s true brilliance is its mediocrity.

At its best, Brokeback Mountain is a 3rd-tier romance, a melodramatic potboiler. Without the novelty of a bromance-turned-sexual-love-affair of two “straight” cowboys, the movie wouldn’t have gotten made.

So it was a seminal work because it was a B-movie, and allowed to be made anyway.

Its release signalled a shift in U.S. society — no longer did every story featuring gay/lesbian or trans characters have to be a masterpiece.

And that, my friends, is true progress.

As a culture, Brokeback Mountain showed that we were now okay with crappy potboiler romances that happened to be gay as well.

And that’s significant — a critical step toward a cultural norm in which gay characters are so commonplace that their inclusion at all is no longer news.

Here’s another area that it’s okay to be mediocre:

4. Most of life.

Woody Allen once said, “80% of life is showing up.”

He’s not wrong.

80% gets you a C. Gets you to average.

Put another way, X gets you to 80%, far ahead of those who don’t even try to show up.

Your job, then, is to optimize it, and put in enough effort to get yourself to a 90%, or B.

In this model, B (or 90%) is still considered mediocrity.

To be a world-class player requires A-game, a solid 95% or higher.

But where the delta between getting a 90% (B) and 95% (A) is putting in one hour of work, vs. putting in three hours of work, the one will suffice.

The other two hours?

Spend them with your kids, your wife, your husband, best friends, or hobbies.

Because the dirty little secret of life is that Woody Allen was right:

80% of the battle is in simply showing up.

If you can show up and put in an average amount of work on top of that, you’ll hit 90%.

And that puts you ahead of 90% of the world for one third of the effort.

And still gives you the free time to enjoy life, and be there for your family.

If that’s not optimization, I don’t know what is.

This was orginally published to my personal blog at http://www.petermorscheck.xyz