The Price of Mediocrity and Its Impact on Character.

 What breeds mediocrity within us? How does it seeps into our character? How does it feels like to live with a mediocre personality or attitude?

In my opinion, mediocrity is similar to living in hell on this planet. Why do I say so? Because it reflects in everything we think, say and do. Every single thing gets engulfed in the aura of mediocrity once we accept it in any single domain of our life. It has been said that ‘the way you do anything is the way you do everything’. It means that if you act without thinking in one area of your life, it gets replicated in other areas of our lives. Lets take decision making as for example. Decision making is in itself a technical process. To make any successful and end achieving decision there are number of factors that need to be considered. Any single factor has the potential to derail a well thought out decision and stop us from achieving the end objective. Hence we can say that if we are prone to impulsive decision making behavior, we would reflect thing impulsive behavior in our communication, leadership, family life, finance handling and other areas. So we can safely say that all these areas of our lives would be a mess and we would be worrying on all these fronts. That’s the price of mediocrity.

Another perspective of mediocrity is something more worrying and disturbing. I tend to get worried a lot about this factor. Consider a situation when you are assigned an important task and you finish it formally and less-heartedly. How do you feel post completion of the task? Do you feel satisfied to the core? How does your soul feels after completing the work in such a manner? How you feel when you go to sleep after executing an important work without any rigor and due diligence? I feel bad. Very bad. In other words, I couldn’t be myself for reasons unknown. I feel anxious. Disturbed. Flood of negative emotions engulf me due to guilt. The reason why I feel in such a manner is because I am doing injustice with my potential by cheating on some important task. I firmly believe that if we are born on this planet our prime responsibility is to fulfill our inherent potential and give it a proper direction so that we may become a contributing and valuable member of this society. By cheating on the responsibility assigned to us, we are not only doing injustice to ourselves but robbing the society of contribution from a valuable member. By cheating ourselves, we cheat the society’s right and become complicit in lowering the standards of the society and civilization at large.

Why do we worship or idolize great personalities like Gandhi, Mandela, Pratap, Shivaji, Lincoln, Washington, Napoleon, etc? It is because they were the people of strong and unshakable character. They were instrumental the course of civilization. Through their actions, they helped in raising the standards of the civilization and forced everyone around them to shed mediocrity and laziness and adopt a new, better and advanced way of life and thinking. They are the people who suffered through adversity and toughness through indomitable will, mountain like character and a will to overcome every challenge thrown towards them. They are idolized because of their actions, willpower, thinking and character. They fulfilled their potential with which they were born with. And their fulfillment of potential raised the bar for the civilization and the modern society.

This is what comes in my mind when I think of mediocrity, rest, entertainment and doing work with casual attitude. It must not be tolerated. Must not be allowed to become a part of our personality and must not be allowed to seep into other parts of our life.

The barriers which we have erected in our minds about the world in which we live in prevents us from pushing our limits. The process is psychological. Why does it happens that people are not able to rectify the mistakes and take another approach to do the work in which they failed previously? Mental barrier. False perception. Wrong narrative. Looking for solutions at the wrong place. Framing questions in wrong way. Mental block. Cognitive dissonance. Approaching the problems repeatedly in the same manner would give us the same results and lead to failure and hence wont push our standards higher. Try to approach the problem from multiple dimensions, broad and narrow look, horizontal and vertical, different mental framework, different case studies, interconnection and understandings, multiple trial and errors- doing these often leads to results which we haven’t thought of. Insights which we haven’t realized earlier. Views that were not a part of our observation. The way of looking at the world changes and then changes the standards which we set for ourselves. To solve bigger and complex problems. To raise to higher standards. And when this happens, we push people around us to the higher standards of performance.

And what does does higher standards means? It simply means that developing such a work ethic that either people around you pushes their standards and expectations of work performance or leave your circle, because if these kind of people stay in our circle of performance, they would collectively bring the net productive of team down and hence would be detrimental to the progress made in the entire past years. That is why people who push the civilization ahead are not the masses. They are the people who have very high levels of negative assessment about their performance due to which they are forced to raise their standards and mental capacity and work stamina that it must produce high quality-result oriented work which has some utility to make lives of people better to some degree.

High standards of work stands for progress. It doesn’t tolerates any factors which could possibly bring failure or backwardness. It abhors that kind of behavior, mental framework, ideologies, activities, hobbies, friendships, relations, community thinking, subtle biases and negativity, toxic people and their subtle toxic attitude. And more than others, it is far more harsh on self assessment because it is our self behavior which tricks us in all the wrong drama unfolding in the world, relation and people issues. Far more than anything, it is important to keep ourselves in check and assessment. Our choices have repercussions. The second and third order effects must be factored in before making any choices so that we can be wary of unfolding of future events. A higher standards of choices would force us to higher standards of behavior and when we are performing in that mental framework, we are not ready to accept anything less than growth and progress.