In the novel Catch-22, the author Joseph Heller famously wrote: “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, others achieve greatness, and some men are thrust upon them.” He’d taken a quote by Shakespeare on greatness and turned it on its head.
The art of kakonomics
Sometimes parties conspire, whether consciously or unconsciously, to achieve either a low-quality or a mediocre outcome
- Kakonomics is an Oxford University paper about this
- The premise is that sometimes people do not show up for meetings or fail to show up at all
- Messages get lost or get mixed up
- Reimbursements get delayed, decreased or forgotten altogether
Social media pressures
We can’t all be Leo Tolstoy, Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein – and it shouldn’t matter to us that we won’t be
- The problem, Mr Manson argues, is that social media ensures we’re constantly exposed to the highlight reel of people’s lives
- While “mediocrity, as a goal, sucks… as a result, is OK”.
Not average
Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui lives in a small town of about 10,000 people in the Canadian province of Alberta, just outside the city of Edmonton.
- It’s not particularly isolated, plus she’s traveled quite a bit in her life, to Africa, Europe and different parts of Canada.
- She taught herself to be bilingual.
Easing up
Sometimes we conspire consciously or unconsciously to achieve the lowest possible outcome
- Leornardo Marseglia, who was charged with fraud in the 1990s for selling adulterated oil under the label “extra virgin”, something that should denote it is of superior quality
- Even in Italy, extra virgin olive oil is expensive
- He was acquitted because many people could afford it
- The route to mediocrity isn’t always paved with such disingenuity
Getting off the wheel
Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui: “When I say I’m mediocre, I am,” she says, posing the question in a recent blog, What if I am mediocre and choose to be at peace with that?”
- Many of us just want to get off the hamster wheel and breathe. But many of us never do.
