Through my work, I’ve come to recognize mediocrity as perhaps the most insidious threat to human performance – and why it may ultimately threaten the entirety of the whole of the human race.
When you examine the best and worst of what humanity has to offer, rarely, if ever, do you find people aspiring to do things poorly. Connected to our instinctive drive for survival is an innate drive to do well, learn, and improve. Natural Selection and the survival of the fittest may be the underpinnings, or possibly it is the satisfaction of accomplishing things that are meaningful and the joy it brings us that has us aiming upward on a trajectory of continuous improvement.
When people deliberately perform very poorly, it is generally out of protest and making a statement to air their displeasure; drawing attention to oneself as a call for help, or a well-executed plan to sabotage themselves or others with an ulterior motive in mind. Yet, some people seemingly do not intend to underperform and exhibit an interest in doing well, yet they still produce sub-standard and lackluster results from their efforts. Society seems to accept this as normal. We have established a baseline where we do not expect the “average” person to excel. We have set the bar low and created standards that reward mediocrity and, by doing so, accept that dysfunction and incompetence are the unavoidable consequence of people being human.
We have set the bar low and created standards that reward mediocrity and, by doing so, accept that dysfunction and incompetence are the unavoidable consequence of people being human.
We have gone so far as to set up social safety nets to allow people to exist without the need to accomplish much of anything worthwhile – and instead reward people for simply conforming to the rules that define normalcy and maintain mediocrity as the status quo. People below the line are sociopaths, ingrates, and the infirm, and people who rise above enter an elite world of lofty expectations, rich rewards, and elevated social status.
Setting standards is a good thing and probably necessary, but we need to establish high standards that create aspiration goals that push us forward as individuals and as a civilization.
It is the work leaders ought to be doing. Instead, much of what we look to leadership for is containment and preservation of what we have rather than pushing towards what might be.
The problem resides in the beliefs we have about the limitations of human performance on all levels. There is a willingness to accept the notion that something is impossible until proven otherwise – and many things we can freely accept as possible were at one time were widely believed with total certainty not to be. Beliefs can be aspirational and fanciful just as surely as they can be self-limiting and even defeatist. But once we know for sure that something is achievable – it becomes part of our system of beliefs.
Having a belief uprooted not only lifts the limits to your thinking, but it can also have a cascading effect: you begin to question other beliefs and reject the limits they impose.
The classic example is the long-held belief that human beings’ physical makeup made it impossible to run faster than a 4-minute mile. Yet once one runner breached that barrier, new records were set and broken in very short order. Of course, that is not to say there is no limit to how fast a person can run a mile, but the belief that what cannot happen has given way to challenging what might be possible and how to make it so.
In the broader realm of how people function and the perceived range of human performance, the limits we impose are often defined in finite terms using superlatives. Striving for perfection is offset by the belief that humans are not perfect – and we cannot be perfect. We cannot expect what we are not. So perfection becomes a foil for mediocrity.
Excellence is another foil. Unlike perfection, which is presumably objective and measurable, excellence is a pure matter of subjective judgment. The pursuit of excellence is a terrific ploy because the objective is a moving target. A person can be the best until someone proves better. Excellence appeals to the competitive spirit driven by an instinctive reaction to natural selection: you must eat or be eaten, and only the fittest survive.
If we measure success purely by winning, we lose sight of what might have been lost without ever having discerned the true cost by being the last person standing.
The measures we use must take into account all the consequences, not just those we aimed for. Humans are social beings for reasons that go beyond procreation and safety. We form tribes and teams to do collectively what individuals cannot. In taking collective action, there are force multipliers like great levers and pulleys that radically expand what we can accomplish through our work.
All of us are smarter than any one of us. And the African proverb that suggests that to “travel fast, travel alone. To travel far, travel together” speaks to the reality of human performance. We are a collection of individual contributors that, when joined together by a common sense of purpose, expand the potential for all of humanity – while elevating the performance of each of us.
There is considerable evidence that people who believe that what they aim to accomplish serves a greater good than just meeting their own wants and needs work harder and achieve more. Being conscientious cultivates and feeds grit: challenging yourself to do more than you might have or even though you could. Grit is about getting comfortable being uncomfortable. While self-interest can create that spark, the fuel to create an enduring flame is most sustainable when we connect to a source of purpose that is larger than us.
Taking aim at mediocrity is about elevating the general human performance status quo by causing people to be conscientious. It is not about being excellent or being perfect. It is about being exceptional.
In a world defined by a status quo that sustains mediocrity, the antidote to the pervasive incompetence and dysfunction we put up with is separating people from the muddle. You can be statistically exceptional on either end of the bell curve of human performance. Those who excel and those who lag are equally out of standard. The outliers on the upper end of the scale are the high performers we hope for. But even those who lag might prove to have great potential. You can only develop potential if you recognize it. Leaders have an opportunity to cultivate performance on both sides of the curve, with the greatest possibility of realizing a benefit in those who fall towards the bottom.
The trick is not rescuing those who are struggling to become competent. Instead, it is a matter of making it necessary and possible for those underperforming to elevate their performance. That means removing the safety nets that allow people to be incompetent and turning them from horizontal to vertical – where, instead, they can use them to climb.
Then you must be careful of how you normalize exceptionalism.
You want to elevate the standards and make them moving targets so that people need and desire to constantly improve just to keep up. When people understand that goals are not hard targets but aspirations that you can never fully reach, they become resilient and learn to be resourceful. And when you recognize that learning and growth are essential to living, you see the things that advance your cause in life as sources of real joy, regardless of whether you get what you thought you wanted.
The status quo isn’t just the enemy of human performance; it can be the catalyst that gets you where you never thought possible. When you see that being exceptional can become another level of status quo, you discover that mediocrity is really about settling. The real goal is to learn how to constantly elevate and never settle for anything less than exceptional performance from yourself and the people you might influence. Then, mediocrity won’t stand a chance.
