Mediocrity VS Excellence
A number of years ago I applied for the BBC Apprentice show. I didn’t have a business plan and the idea of living potentially for weeks in London away from family was a non starter. My aim was to encourage and motivate some very bright students to take risks, reach for things that you assume are beyond you. I moved through three rounds of interview before deciding that I had achieved enough and could bow out. Not wishing to invest too much time on the venture I filled in the application form with words instead of sentences. When asked to describe my abilities I wrote “I am awesome”!
The panel of interviewers didn’t appreciate the pithy one liner and asked me to define exactly how awesome and in what way I am awesome. The truth is most of the candidates who thought they were potential partners for Lord Sugar were dismissed sooner than I, reinforcing their own sense of mediocrity.
Life is competitive and ignoring that for fear of upsetting the losers might not be the way to go. For generations of British youngsters, the annual school Sports Day has seen them hopping their way to victory in a sack or running around balancing an egg on a spoon. But at one primary school traditional races are to be banned over fears that the pressure of winning and losing could be too great for some pupils to cope with. Instead, children at Barnwell Primary in Sunderland will now take part in a ‘fit-for-fun day’ with the three-legged race and the sprint relay replaced by aerobics and an inflatable assault course.
Teachers at the school have introduced the alternative event hoping that it will enable the school’s 260 children – aged between three and 11 – to learn the importance and value of simply taking part in sport.
Kathryn Linsley, the school’s Physical Education coordinator, said: “This is for the children who aren’t as competitive and confident as others, but who can be active, without the threat of losing and the disappointment that comes with it.
Conservative MEP for the north east Martin Callanan said: “Children have to learn that life is competitive. Trying to insulate them from the reality of life is unfair.”
Roger Davis, development manager for the National Council for School Sports, said the problem is when people say we don’t want competition altogether. “Life is competitive. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.”
An example of mediocrity VS Excellence gone made. In the 1984 Academy award winning movie Amadeus, while Antonio Salieri is housed in an insane asylum, a pastor comes to hear the elderly Salieri’s confession and assures him, “All men are equal in God’s eyes.”
Salieri knows better. “Are they?” he asks rhetorically.
When faced with people who are better than us, better writers, better managers, better friends, better housekeepers we have two choices: be inspired or be angry.
Ayn Rand is well aware of the large segment of the population that chooses anger, that can only tear down in order to feel better about themselves. In The Fountainhead, when the ordinary Peter Keating is faced with the architectural talents of Howard Roark, he feels inadequate and vows to break Roark.
And Ellsworth Toohey, whose only apparent talent is to manipulate the public through his newspaper column, sets out on a campaign to destroy the clearly superior work of Roark. His philosophy holds that the mere presence of Roark’s designs makes others’ work pale in comparison, and that just isn’t fair.
But Rand is not the only one who understands the problem of the mediocre. Antonio Salieri is a perfect example of a man not inspired but completely destroyed by the talents, the genius, of another: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
His contempt grows as Mozart’s mere presence becomes a never-ending reminder of Salieri’s inferiority. And like Toohey, he must extinguish the contrast. He must destroy Mozart to destroy the evidence of his own mediocrity
The desperation to be recognized and the curse of mediocrity eventually land Salieri in an insane asylum, calling out to and absolving all of the other mediocrities housed there.
The knowledge that someone might be more talented, smarter, a harder worker, braver, more willing to take risks, or more adventuresome brings the mediocre to their knees, leaving them unable to function.
I wonder about the fate of the generation of children brought up in a world where the contrast between the superior and the average, the mediocre if you will, is deliberately suppressed. A world where no one keeps score and where all players on all teams receive trophies. What does this teach our children about the best and the brightest? Only that it is the presence of the best that makes us feel badly about ourselves. And the only way to feel better is to keep them suppressed.
But, is it legitimate to view ourselves as superior and more talented than others? How would we know? I know that I have imagined myself doing daring and brave things, believing that I would react as a superhero in the face of some profound injustice. But is that likely?
12 years a Slave is based on the 19th-century memoir of Solomon Northup and follows the tribulations of an educated carpenter, musician and family man from New York state who, in 1841, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south a shockingly common phenomenon. Stripped of his past, his identity and even (in the eyes of the law) his humanity, the renamed “Platt” becomes the property of plantation owner Ford.
So often when people discuss slaves, there is always someone who claims, “why didn’t the slaves rebel?” As well as insisting that if they had lived in the American South, “they would have freed all of their slaves.”
What all these responses have in common is a surely unintentional, self-aggrandizement. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.
Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.
That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook–but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
It Couldn’t Be Done By Edgar Albert Guest
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done But he with a chuckle replied That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried. So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, and he did it!
There are people who go out of their way to be mediocre.
People undo important, great, accurate work and make it worse, when they could have just left it alone.
The main obstacle to excellence is not the effort it requires to be excellent. Rather, it’s the effort required to stand up against the strange folks in this world that seem to be utterly devoted to taking excellent projects and turning them into average.
As Churchill said, “The challenge is not winning the war. The challenge is persuading them to let you win it.”
Here’s how Patrick Lencioni, an American writer of books on business management puts it in his latest newsletter:
If you’re not willing to do things that others would say are over the top, and if you’re not comfortable being criticized for being annoying and for having standards that seem perhaps just a little too high, then you’ll drift toward mediocrity.
And though no one would ever aspire to being mediocre, it is more tempting than we might realize.
After all, the majority of people out there will encourage us to take the easy route, because that isn’t threatening to them. They’ll support us as we justify cutting a corner here and lowering our standards there, because it isn’t reasonable to do anything more.
If you were conscious of an echo during today’s Torah reading you are not losing it. After each description of a completed item for the Mishkan/Tabernacle the Torah text emphasises they did each thing “like God had commanded them via Moses”.
Everything was done to perfection, there was no cutting corners, slackening off or trying to do it differently than the way it was instructed, remember they had received commands and suggestions from God. As the second book of the Torah comes to an end we have a nation not just a family, living freely and not as slaves with a theocentric life with God in the centre and the focus of all they do. If mediocrity is permitted in other areas of life and I am not so certain that it should then there is one area of life that perfection is essential, the response to the call of God. If we fall and fail at times which inevitably we will its cannot be through lack of motivation and effort. We need to strive to become outstanding Jews. If we wouldn’t tolerate mediocrity in our professional and personal lives then we must demand the same from our religious lives so that our deeds are describes as being done “like God commanded Moses” and then the words we all said today at the end of the reading Chazak Chazak Venitchazak- be strong be strong and may we be strengthened!” will be said to encourage us even further as we all strive to be outstanding Jews.
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