We need to fight Mediocrity!
There’s a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged
Sean Penn
It can sound arrogant or pretentious to say so, but I really think we need to encourage people to fight mediocrity! It’s perhaps one of the most dangerous poisons of our current lives. But what is mediocrity? Mediocrity is this status between bad and good, when something is not suffisant, not qualitative. The problem of mediocrity is not only its intrinsic definition, but also, and perhaps more important, is the fact that people are satisfied with mediocrity. Fighting mediocrity is fighting its production, and also its celebration.
Mediocrity is everywhere in the tech world for example:
- Startups that limit themselves to copy a concept, or do something cheap (a good example: all the daily deals stupid websites)
- Medias, and especially blogs that write articles about topics they don’t know anything about or just because it generates trafic, so they produce crap.
- Consultants or any business guys, who just tries to do the minimum viable, and not the best.
In my post about me turning entrepreneur, I wrote something that people remembered “My project will be huge. Actually, it’s either it’s huge, or it isn’t”. I’ve thought a lot about it since I’ve started the project and met plenty of people. What I really think is that not only am I trying to build an ambitious project, not only do I want to change things, but I’m also trying to fight mediocrity as much as I can. I don’t want to take the easy way, I don’t want shortcuts that lead me to bad quality.
And as in Sean Penn’s quote that I used to start this post, not only do we need to fight mediocrity in what we’re doing, but we also need to fight mediocrity celebration!
Oh, and I need your help. If you ever think something I say, write or produce is mediocre, please tell me. Honestly.
