There's nothing wrong with being mediocre🤷👍

The almost unacceptable reality of Mediocrity 🙂

Wait! Wait! Read this first

You enter your mail 6 or 7 days into the new year and you're seeing a newsletter with a subject line that says you should embrace mediocrity. 'Tah! Bad energy get away from me' That's probably what will come to your mind first innit? But stay with me till the end, will you?

But really, my friends, what is wrong with mediocrity?

Let's break this down, what is mediocrity? Google defines it as 'something or someone of only moderate quality; not very good.' and not very bad either. So does that make mediocrity a balance? Something between two extremes. Doesn't that mean average, ordinary, normal, moderate, and even decent?

We live in a society that has highly underrated mediocrity. They make it look so bad that even motivational speakers who are themselves mediocre make you feel less of yourself. They tell you to aim for the sky, be an overachiever, take risks and aim for the best. The truth is, very few of us will be the best and very few of us will be the worst, alot of us will be somewhere in the middle, alot of us with be average.

Canadian national and fellow mediocrity-embracer Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui wrote in a blog, “I love to learn but I’m not the most brilliant person. I like to write but that doesn’t mean I’m the greatest writer. I’m just kind of plain,” and that's it for most of us. In a world full of human, there are geniuses and there are the rest of us and there are dullards and there are also the rest of us🙂👍

The average person live life in this futile circle of striving for what they cannot have, trying to overachieve, trying to chase the top and when they die struggling, they die without peace of mind but not until they've passed this baton of striving for the extremes of greatness to their generations and generation to come.

I read in a blog that "The pursuit of excellence inevitably hijacks a world of peace and leisure; it is hard to escape it, and we’re resolved to proving the many ways in which we’re special and unique at all times." And like Mark Manson said in his book, The subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck, 'You are not special!'. The sooner you come to terms with that reality, the easier it will be for your existence to be a peaceful one and the better it will be for your mental health.

We've been programmed as a society to go for the most of anything, the most popular, the most intelligent, the most accepted, the most this and the most that. In actual fact, that it is 'most' means very few people are needed to be there. So? Will you strive to be that 1% and bring an extra burden over yourself or will you settle for where you are and choose your peace of mind?

Not everyone can be a celebrity, not everyone can be extraordinary and not everyone can be at the highest hierarchy of life. Few would be born with the silver spoon and majority would be born with a copper spoon.

This piece is not suppose to demotivate you and discourage you from striving, rather it is to show you a painful reality that you might not accept now but will come to accept later.

This however does not mean you have to be mediocre in every aspect of life. Mediocrity is relative. You can excel in medicine and be mediocre in all other things (shrugs). You can excel in writing and be mediocre in other areas of life. You can excel in one thing and be mediocre in every other thing. There are however exceptions, you can't always be mediocre in faith and in your academics simply because you're accountable to someone. In academics, you're accountable to anyone sponsoring you and in Faith, you're accountable to God. However whenever you are left to be accountable to yourself and you don't happen to get the very best of what you want or what you want to be, there's nothing wrong with settling for mediocrity.

Mediocrity is an option, and I'm giving you reasons to choose it when your option A repeatedly fails you.

I know it's hard to hear that mediocrity is normal, but it is really. Except you're born into a rich home where families are interconnected and family bonds are formed so that intergenerational wealth can continue, if you're born into a normal Nigerian setting, a normal middle class, you have to come to terms with the reality that you might be mediocre and the sooner you become content with that, the better.

I consider Japan one of the best countries in the world and the most cultured. They are well advanced in technology and there are barely any poor person in Japan. But guess what? Only about 3.6% population of Japanese are millionaires 🤷 When you have a culture of being contented, life becomes easy🤷

Striving for the top takes so many things away from you one of which include peace of mind (I know, I know, you're like "to hell with peace of mind, I want to be a billionaire"). I can't explain this enough. This piece is probably the most controversial thing I've ever written. For an audience who have been groomed in a society that set high standards for it's people, even though most never keep up to the high standard. This will be hard to take in.

Mediocrity is not less, mediocrity is normal, mediocrity is average and most of us are average. In many disciplines, Physiology for instance would always refer to average when making a measurement or something else to buttress a fact. For instance, in physiology the average weight of a man is 70Kg. Meaning someone can be more than 70kg (say you're a body builder or a sumo wrestler) or less than 70Kg (say you're a gymnast who needs light weight). So you see being average applies in probably every sphere of life.

Mark Manson likened the idea of “overachievers” not being a norm to that of a bell curve. The curve gets really thin at the far ends of any graph; meaning there are very few people who are either really good at something or really bad at it. The rest of us fall back into mediocrity.

There is nothing wrong with being mediocre. The highest hierarchy of life is accepting of very few people, if you're not opportune to be accepted, there is nothing wrong with settling for mediocrity. Mediocrity is normal, mediocrity is not less. “We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. The vast majority of us will never be truly exceptional at, well, anything. And that’s OK.”

Yours Fervently

AJ from the Campus letterman

This piece is very much open to criticism but come at me with solid point my friends.

Till next time❤️🙂