One reason I’m increasingly interested in mediocrity as an ethos is that I sense this creeping, paralyzing perfectionism starting to infuse stuff I do.
Mediocrity is movement. It is staying in the high reps/volume middle zone rather than wandering into 1RM zone.
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Mediocrity is an energizing aesthetic blindness that allows you to blunder, crash, and muddle through resistance you didn’t know was there. Experience invariably curses you with taste and that’s the beginning of the end, when you acquire ability to smell perfection a step away.
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The only way out is to keep pushing yourself into zones where you’re not unskilled but are tasteless. Past the perils of beginner startup friction but short of the curse of taste. This means sidling into adjacent lanes, not jumping into entirely new things.
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Path of least resistance is a good heuristic for this up to a point. Momentum is everything. Stasis is death. Keep moving or die.
There are problems here I haven’t sorted out yet, but this is now snowballing into a set of questions for me that I suspect will occupy me all year.
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Hmm revealing that you can half-ass form a little bit with weights well within your ability to control, but any form short of perfect will probably seriously injure you in a true one-rep max attempt (which I’ve never attempted, thank you very much... my minimum is 5 reps).
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You’re turning mediocrity into a practice of excellence. I’m going to be mediocre at being mediocre. And I’m going to do it better than anyone.
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When you have the entire world of information at your fingertips, lack of wisdom ceases to be an excuse for your failings, which makes it easy to call yourself a student and use it as an excuse for inaction.
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Keep doing these tweets, they're super valuable at this point in time I think. The rest of the smart/insight twitter is aggressively and exclusively promoting "Type A" ethos: more structure, more planning, more discipline.
Refreshing to see your mediocrity takes. Voice of reason
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Habit formation, discipline, high standards, work ethic. These are astoundingly overrated now and have really low correlation with doing meaningful things.
In fact they actively divert scarce mental resources away from meaningful impact
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