Are You Mediocre or Outstanding?
- We’ve always done it that way.” We don’t challenge our assumptions and frequently reflect on how we should do things now.
- “I am too old to change.” In The Dog Ate My Homework, philosophy professor Vincent Barry calls this learning cop-out “some seniors’ socially sanctioned refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for attitudes, actions, and circumstances well within his or her power to influence.” He goes on to write, “It’s also about dying before one’s time by living half-heartedly the time one has left. In this respect, ‘I’m too old to change’ is about all of us who refuse to live by refusing to change; for ‘to change is to mature, [and] to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.’”
- Losing our childlike curiosity. Our sense of wonder and discovery is replaced with cynicism and apathy—”been there, done that, what else is new?” One of the most prolific artists in history (he created more than 20,000 works), the Spanish painter and sculptor, Pablo Picasso, has been called the greatest artist of the 20th century. He once observed, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
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Learning strictly through our own experience. It’s often better to borrow experience than to just learn from our own. Not only can that be less painful, it’s much faster. Books, seminars, mentoring, networking, group problem-solving and the like are some of the ways we can learn from other people’s experience.
- Creatures of habit. It’s so easy to slip into routines that close us off from new approaches and learning. Even our thinking can fall victim to repeating worn-out clichés, platitudes, and dogma. In The Tragic Sense of Life, the Spanish philosophical writer, Miguel de Unamuno, writes, “To fall into habit is to begin to cease to be.”
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Having all the answers. In his personal journal, the French artist Eugène Delacroix made this entry on February 25, 1852: “Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them … a capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.”
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Satisfied and complacent. Only a mediocre person is always at his or her best. If I am getting very comfortable with my expertise and skill levels, my learning has leveled out. I am not stretching and challenging myself enough. My comfort zone is fossilizing into a complacency zone.
- Fearing to attempt. We know that the turtle only makes progress by sticking his head out. Yet we sit and dream about what we’re going to do someday. If we don’t take steady steps toward our dreams, the walls around our complacency zone get ever higher and thicker.
- Fuzzy focus. Our growth and development should be taking us somewhere. If we don’t know where we want to go, what we stand for, or why we’re here, any experience and learning path will do. We just wander around and hope for the best.
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