It is time you faced it: You’re not exceptional
“I know of no one more qualified to write about mediocrity.” — Sir John Hegarty.
These days I have time to reflect on the long hours, lucky breaks, brick walls and occasional breakthrough that tacked together are known as a career. I am drawn to the heretical conclusion that most people would be better off if they stopped trying to be so bloody brilliant and tried to make the most of being mediocre.
The sooner you come to terms with the possibility a lack of ability, rather than bad luck, is denying you your rightful position as a Legend, the better. Stop beating up yourself, and those around you; accept your limitations, and make the most of your mediocrity. It will make you happier and help your career.
My aim is not to insult. Well, not entirely. I believe a number of ways can turn the limitations of your talents to your advantage and we’ll look at those in coming weeks with help from sources such as Socrates, the movie Moneyball, and five years spent working in casinos.
The problem is not the aspiration to be brilliant, which is understandable; the problem is the remote likelihood of success and the personal issues resulting from not being as good as you keep telling yourself you should be. Not terrible, not brilliant, just mediocre. I’ve met incredibly smart people who have made little of their talents, and exceedingly average ones who have had great success. There are buckets of self-help books showing you how to be AMAZING! Yet none that do much to help the 80 per cent of people who are just OK.
I expect by now some of you will be thinking, “that’s all very well, but obviously this mediocrity stuff doesn’t apply to me because I’m actually pretty bloody exceptional”. Possibly true, statistically unlikely. Most people are deluded about their abilities and think themselves way better than they are.
This phenomenon is known as Superiority Bias or sometimes “The Lake Wobegon Effect” (a fictional town where all children are above average). A famous 1977 survey at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, found that 94 per cent of the faculty rated themselves as above average. Not the students, the teachers had a woeful understanding of their place in the world.
The issue is not just that people are not as good as they think, it’s also that they struggle to judge between good and bad work. The DunningKruger effect suggests that those who are poor at a certain task are also poor at judging how well others perform that task. Witness the junior staff who are scathing about other people’s work, yet who are incapable of doing anything half as good. (No doubt I was one.) There are also those irritating people who fight like a cornered mongoose to get through an idea everyone else can see is clearly “meh” at best. (Me, again.)
A senior client of a large UK company once said to me “the trouble with you guys is that you’re always trying to give us 100 per cent . . . we’d be more than happy with 80 per cent.” I believe he was saying what most clients are thinking. Yes, you’ll come across clients asking for “amazing, cut-through” work, but their definition of such is almost always very different from yours.
The sales director of a car company once hurried across a room to tell me in gushing tones how impressed he was with our most recent ad for them. My chest involuntarily swelled and I listened eagerly to hear what particular element of our wonderful press ad had most impressed him: The witty headline? The cutting-edge art direction? The iconoclastic theme? “It’s got three pictures of our cars in the same ad,” he said. “Best thing we’ve ever run.”
Rather than something “absolutely brilliant”, business clients are generally searching for something that will do a good job of selling their product and which they won’t be sacked for. Advertising people, on the other hand, want to create something which will make them famous. Rarely do these two desires actually coincide.
Books about the likes of Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos like to leave the reader with the impression that they could be just as successful and almost as rich if only they tried a little harder. What nonsense.
Only a delusional schoolboy watches a Lionel Messi video and thinks that with a little extra practice he will be playing in a World Cup final. Yes, one in a hundred million schoolboys will be right. But the chances of that schoolboy being you are also one in a hundred million. It’s time to play the percentages.
Next week we’ll look at a simple test that should give you an idea of just how mediocre you really are and what you should do about it.
● Paul Catmur worked in advertising at a quite good level across New Zealand, the UK and Australia, including co-founding and selling his agency in Auckland. This is the first in a series of articles about converting your limitations into advantages. His advertising podcast is available at www.truthandsoul.co. nz