Fight Mediocrity
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Good is the enemy of great.
Seth Godin published a very short but very powerful post on his blog today. He called it “On the road to mediocrity”
We all face the opportunity so often. To settle for good enough, when actually nothing is really good enough we settle for it so often in our life’s, in our jobs in our relationships and in our lives.
My hugest disappointments as an academic (which I only very recently became) has been the number of students who expect to be spoon fed to their qualifications. Those who resist the opportunity to learn while working in the richness of the real world as they are taken through real live projects and I attempt to mentor, rather than tell them what to do. Those who look no further than their notes and their lecturers (let alone the text book) in order to harvest the marks required, surely its knowledge and skills they need instead.
I am reminded of a creative director with whom I worked with at The White House, a top advertising agency, and who often said “how can you fly with eagles if you are scratching with fowl” and he was correct. We need to decide what our standards are and not accept anything less. If we catch ourselves scratching, we owe it to ourselves to shake the dirt out of our feathers and fly.
Jim Collins wrote a book about it “Good to Great“ in which he explores why most organisations settle for the ordinary. Every day we make the choice over and over again, and we are the losers when we settle for ok instead of the best, when instead of being remarkable we are merely competent.
As Godin say’s “the only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.”
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Wogan
