The Curse of Mediocrity
Vulnerable sides of the thinkingbat!
I have been hesitating a lot to write and publish this blog. I just felt that the following words were a little personal and forced me to expose the vulnerable side of my personality. The only reason why I am writing this is because I want to convince myself that there are more people like me. Honestly, I am pretty sure that there are — most probably you are as well.
I am talking about the curse of mediocrity. As a kid, I was good at studies — neither great nor horrible. Always scored between 70-80%, sometimes an occasional 90% out of the blue. The same pattern kind of continued in my graduation as well. I was like the 8th or 10th smartest (highest scoring) kid in my classroom. Rarely the first.
And sadly, I have been going through this pattern in my professional career for the last 5 years. Started two startups during my graduation - one did well, and we made decent money for two clueless nineteen-year-olds trying to navigate the world of tech. The second one was a straight-up failure even though we got incubated under a government scheme. Couldn’t even finish building the product.
You see the pattern? Neither great nor worse, somewhere in between all along. Something that you cannot continue pursuing, but even the idea of quitting makes you uncomfortable.
After graduation, the corporate world chose me. Met a founder on Twitter and he offered me a job. I had nothing better to do at the moment, plus I had some financial obligations and responsibilities — so I said yes. It’s been almost two years since I have been working at the place. Great people, incredible learnings, with the usual struggle of being in a tech company.
One day I was sitting with my CEO and he was giving me some feedback on my declining performance over the last few weeks. This is exactly what he said, “If I have to rate Harsh, he’s somewhere around 6 or 7. But have we seen the 8s and 9s? Yes. That is why the expectations we have from you are higher.”
That’s when it clicked to me, the same pattern has started to repeat all over again — that I have been mediocre all along my life. I was sitting in the shades of blue for a very long time, thinking about all the times I was stranded in the middle of stupid and brilliant. I could feel the curse of mediocrity.
Even the efforts I put in to excel at something have never been extraordinary. Like the time when I was preparing for IIT-JEE, I heard kids studying 8-10 hours a day — while I was only able to stretch myself for 3. My dad with a 30k/mo salary was paying for my expensive coaching classes and study material. I understood the financial burden of things, but I just couldn’t do it. No idea how kids of autowalas crack the exam on their first attempt. I was born into a very middle-class family, and my dad’s salary never exceeded beyond 40k1. The curse started to feel hierarchical. As if, that’s where we are supposed to be. I felt bad that I might be just another version of my dad’s financial mediocrity.
I understand that you might find undertones of self-pity in this article. But trust me it’s not. I’m sharing a journey of self-exploration.
Let’s continue. So after my CEO’s comments, I started wondering how I could escape this curse of mediocrity. I was into bio-hacking for a while — sitting in the sun, consuming nootropics, etc. And these things did help. But it soon started to dawn upon me that it was probably not the right solution. I realized I needed a big change in my life. And I also realized that most people are mediocre — so there’s probably no escape.
This was also the time when my sister started to force me to move to the US for an MBA. I made some false promises and did nothing about it — had some reasons that that option did really make much sense to me. I didn’t like the idea of turning into a liability from an asset. So I continued with my work and tried to figure out ways to get better at it.
But my sister’s offer did make sense. That was the moment of revelation. I mean, isn’t it better to be a mediocre student at a mediocre college in the United States than to be in a mediocre college in Delhi for a person born in a third-world country? Of course, it is. This is when I realized that I might not be able to escape the curse of mediocrity, but in some cases2 it’s better to be a mediocre person in a brilliant place than in a bad or mediocre place.
This is only one way that I have found to sort of escape the curse of mediocrity. I am sure there are many others to be found and discussed. I will keep my journey alive and share the insights along the way. Until then, keep trying to rise above mediocrity.
I am not sure if moving to the States is the answer, but one thing’s for sure. Life is asking me to make a big change in my life, to take a leap, to maybe take a step back to move in the right direction.
INR, of course.
In some cases, not always. Why? Because being a mediocre employee at a Big 4 is probably not as good as being a mediocre employee at a scrappy but growing startup. Flipkart recently paid $700M to their 19000 employees in ESOP after the splitting of PhonePe. So it was definitely more advantageous to work at Flipkart in 2012 than at Deloitte or KPMG.