Tactical Mediocrity
I’ve been playing with a concept I call tactical mediocrity. My definition:
A conscious decision not to develop your level of accomplishment or explore your potential in a given field.
You don’t want to be the best, or even great, because of all the crap that comes with it: pressure, scrutiny, attention, responsibility. You just want to tool along in the shallows, stick to the small time.
You can apply this to as many or as few areas of your life as you wish. Apply it to you whole life, though, and I might have to come up with a definition for strategic mediocrity…
A critical element here is that any use of tactical mediocrity is a conscious decision. You have considered the pros and cons of developing yourself in a given field and decided that there are good reasons not to, either now or ever. This is not an irreversible decision but one you can re-evaluate as frequently as you wish.
You’d love to be a great amateur photographer and conquer the interestingness pages on Flickr. You really ought to improve your cooking skills on your way to becoming a domestic god or goddess. You should learn how to get more out of your computer as you’ve seen others doing cool or useful things. But for some reason, you’ve taken a conscious decision not to progress beyond your present mediocrity, at least for now.
There are various circumstances when this might be a useful approach:
- You want to focus on other priorities: you could become great at cooking, but that would require more time and effort than you’re prepared to give it.
- You don’t want to risk losing the fun from an activity: photography as a hobby might be fun but devoting the time and energy to be great might take the joy out of it.
- You don’t want your advanced skills to make you a magnet for extra work or responsibility in that area: “Gee, Henderson is a whiz with spreadsheets, get him to overhaul the budget projections for my meeting on Friday.”
So you can see how this might be useful. But as with any slippery mental concept there are risks.
- Procrastination: if you’ve made a commitment to yourself or somebody else to do something, using any of the reasons above to put it off is cheating.
- Unrealised awesomeness: you miss the chance to become truly great in the field in question and enjoy all that success, however defined, brings with it.
- Missed opportunities: you don’t do the thing, so the life-changing experience that would have been yours stays on the shelf.
- Unpushed envelope: don’t make tactical mediocrity your default response unless you never want to risk getting outside your comfort zone. It can be scary, but it’s only then that you develop yourself to get more from life than you currently do.
These risks are why any time you put something in a drawer on the grounds of tactical mediocrity you should set an appropriate future date to review your decision. Maybe three months, maybe a year. But make sure you do because the world changes, bless it, and you’d hate to be working off outdated judgments.
I found it useful to consider where I might usefully deploy tactical mediocrity in my life. I also thought about where I’ve unconsciously settled for mediocrity and took this opportunity to re-evaluate those decisions. Perhaps you would too.
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