On Celebrating Mediocrity

 
Published on 2017-01-29 by John Collins. Socials: YouTube - X - Spotify - Amazon Music - Apple Podcast

One frustrating aspect to operating within the software industry for me is our propensity to celebrate mediocrity, or in the more extreme form the celebration of outright quantifiable failure. In a mediocre organization, everyone is a winner. It reminds me of this scene from one of my favorite movies "The Incredibles":

The problem with this mindset is that it allows us to gloss over failures, which removes the opportunity to actually threat a failure as a learning opportunity.

It's okay to fail if you learn from it. It's not okay to celebrate your failures. I will leave you with one final thought on this from another of my favorite movies "Mad Max: Fury Road":

Mediocre