The words used in the title of this post are all words that came from my thesaurus for the word “mediocre.”
mediocre |?m?d???k?r|
adjective
of only moderate quality; not very good: a mediocre actor
It makes me wonder if this is the way my English teachers would have explained my skills to my parents during my early years of school.
Mom: How’s Noah doing in creative writing this year?
Teacher: Noah’s only writing at a moderate level of quality. If I was to be perfectly honest with you, he’s just not that good at it.
Looking back now at my blog, specifically between the years of 2006-2009, and questioning the reasons I chose not to blog more often, I may have been mistaken in the reasons why I never actually wrote more.
I usually attributed the lack of posting to “no time.” But now I’m wondering if I was simply scared of mediocrity. The fear of mediocrity is just as strong as the dreaded, and evil, fear of failure. How can we overcome such an opponent?
I read hundreds and hundreds of blogs on a weekly basis. Many of the writers are simply brilliant. The creators of the content inspire me daily.
Bloggers like; Derek Sivers, Ben Coe, Quoteflections, Seth Godin, Hugh MacLeod, Caitlin McCabe , Jason Seiden, Liz Danzico, Chris Guillebeau. Jonathan Fields, to name just a few.
The fear of mediocrity bubbles up from within. It’s easier to do nothing, than it is to appear mediocre to others, or so we think. We allow that fear to debilitate us and then nothing happens. Fear of this kind can cause our blogs to sit empty and dormant for years.
It’s been pounded into us for years that perfection is the ultimate goal. Is it really worth doing if you can’t do it right?
I mean, if you can’t write as well as the millions of other great bloggers out there, is it really worth the time and effort to spend every day putting fingers to the keyboard? (That’s our internal fear talking, or lizard brain, or the resistance, or whatever we want to call it….)
Here’s the thing, It’s worth it.
The task doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether the task is writing a blog post, or starting a new business, or finishing an essay, or writing an outrageous advertisement, or creating a piece of art, or building a piece of furniture, or developing a website, or rewriting your resume, or telling a story at a campfire, or calling an old friend, or drawing a cartoon, or recording some music in your basement, or expressing your intention to start a diet and exercise.
It will never be “perfect.”
This form of resistance will rear its ugly head to try to convince you it’s not worth it at every step of the way. It will get stronger, and stronger, and stronger until the very last moment when you get close to the end. Close to the moment of actually finishing it, it will make one last-ditch effort to try to stop you. It will do it’s best to convince you that what you’ve created is nothing more than a big steamy pile of mediocrity.
For me, that moment is right now.
And then I hit publish.
