The Trap of Mediocrity

I have been thinking recently about what makes a person stand out in a world with almost 8 billion people. Whether in business or personal life, standing out in the "market" seems like a tedious task. It occurred to me that being good at everything may not be better than being extremely good at one or a few things.

Photo by Paweł L.: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-people-1245055/

I recently read the book Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and it was an impressive, eye-opening account of her life, passions, and fight for liberty for all. One of the things I find most impressive about her personality is how definite she is in deciding what she likes and dislikes, and what she is good at.

She excels in languages, philosophy, and social science, but she is not interested in math and physics. In her first few years living in the Netherlands, she tried to attend a bookkeeping school but quit a few weeks later in order to wait and try to enroll at Leiden University for political science. After graduating, she worked in sales for a large pharmaceutical company and quit three weeks later because she realized it was not for her. She later got a job as a junior researcher at Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), the think tank of the Dutch center-left Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid; PvdA). This marked the beginning of her political and research career. There is no question that she is a bright woman, but knowing what she can be good at and quitting things for which she has little affinity contributed to her success.

It takes courage for one to accept inadequacy and focus on the things they genuinely enjoy and/or can excel at. Of course, effort is a prerequisite to becoming good enough at something before you can explore your next destination, or in another word your niche. After all, perhaps this is what being true to yourself really means: having the curiosity to try, the mind to reflect, and the courage to pursue what your heart tells you.

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