Mediocrity Is A Choice

About ten years ago I had made an acquaintance, a friend of mine's father, who would impart wisdom on us weekly when we met for coffee.  He was a successful businessman and was involved with the younger generation by offering them sales jobs right out of high school and college and sought to teach them about finances, responsibility, and decision making.  I distinctly remember one afternoon when we were discussing how to make a big decision in life, this particular instance was about taking a job that required moving to a new city.  The lesson can be applied to all major aspects of life though.

He offered us the advice that you couldn't be comfortable with a decision until you had gotten rid of all your alternatives, although he had used a more colorful description of how to eliminate the excess.  He told us that as long as you have other options you can never truly commit to a project, a job, or anything else in life that required a commitment.  If you always kept an escape plan, any time a situation became difficult you would opt to leave.  This, he described, is why people tended to be mediocre.  It is natural for people to abandon a project when it becomes trying, instead of sticking with it and enjoying the fruits of their labor down the road.  Greatness required a sense of urgency.  Having alternatives gave people a passiveness and a carelessness about their day to day lives.

I had a lot to think about after that talk, and now when I think about what he said and relate to it as a coach I understand even more.  In order to excel at a sport you have to eliminate the option of being mediocre at it.  That might sound counter-intuitive.  You simply can't decide to be above average, or can you?  I think about elite level high school talent that I have met who aren't doing half the training, or preparation, they could be doing to further themselves along as an athlete.  There are plenty of coaches around the county who do well because of the talent in their programs, not necessarily that they go above and beyond.

If there are some at the top who are seeing success off of average work ethic, that simply leads me to believe that the middle of the pack, and the back of the pack for that matter, are that far behind simply due to lack of effort.  If all work ethics were equal, talent alone would stratify elite and average and below average talent, but it isn't.  Therefore you would assume to see elite level talent in the mediocre groups more often due to bad work ethics, but even that isn't normally the case.  Simply, what this tells me is middle of the road talent, instead of working up to an elite work ethic, instead also have a middle of the road work ethic.

To sum up, I am saying being mediocre is a choice.  Just like what Malcolm Gladwell talked about in his book Outliers, deliberate practice and a refusal to succumb to the pressure to give up is what it takes to be truly elite, even amongst those with elite level talent. But the average person can climb vastly higher than they truly allow themselves in most situations.  There is, of course, one other important factor to success and that is the providence to be exposed to the necessary components at the correct time, but that will be explored in the next post.