#77: Mediocrity is underrated!
Here we are, a third of the way through January. Have you slipped up on your new year resolutions yet? Will you be kind to yourself if you do? Or will you tell yourself that you're a failure, you can't do anything right, you should just do everyone a favour and give up now? The thing is, friend, there's a dark side to positive change. Too many of us are motivated to change for the better because we don't think we're acceptable as we are. We don't feel entitled to ease back and enjoy life. We wouldn't know how. The idea of an ordinary, unremarkable life terrifies us. We like to think of our drive and ambition as positive things - but what if they're fuelled by our lack of self-acceptance? Get yourself comfortable, and let's look again at mediocrity.
Find the 5 whys exercise here.
Go here for 'The benefit of breaking your New Year's resolutions', my article for the IAI.
'Overcoming the need to be exceptional' by The School of Life can be read here (paywalled) and listened to (not paywalled) here.
Episode transcript:
What would it be like to give the achievement a rest?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello friends, and welcome to the first episode of 2024! I hope you had a good break, and that you’re easing carefully into the new (well, newish) year. I’m recording this with whatever bug all the other Roaches were suffering from over the holiday. I hoped I’d escaped, but apparently not. I’m going to have my work cut out editing out coughing from this episode. But January isn’t January without feeling a bit off-colour, is it?
So, I took a break from podcasting for a few weeks over the holiday, and it’s made me realise that, despite this entire podcast supposedly being a battle against perfectionism, I’m probably a bit perfectionistic about getting the episodes out. Once a fortnight, come what may. It helps that I enjoy doing it - it’s something that feels energising to me, rather than depleting. But this little break I’ve taken from it has unleashed all sorts of panics. What if my beloved listeners desert me? What if, having taken a break, I lose focus and never find my rhythm again? What if … to be honest, I don’t think I even bothered to complete most of the ‘what ifs’ I had about this. I suppose that if I were really devoted to battling perfectionism I should learn from this and take a more relaxed approach to getting the episodes out. But I don’t want to do that. I enjoy the podcast, as I said. And I don’t want to be too perfectionistic about resisting perfectionism … if that’s not too mindbendingly meta for our first episode back. So, back to the fortnightly schedule it is, every other Friday, starting now.
Anyway, despite the break in podcast episodes, it hasn’t been all quiet on the imperfectionist front. I wrote an article last week about new year resolutions and perfectionism for the Institute of Arts and Ideas. Look, don’t get angry, we were on a break! It would be cool and trendy, I suppose, to be anti-new year resolutions, but I’m not. How can anyone be anti-positive change? But one thing that Alexis Papazoglou, the editor who commissioned my IAI article, pushed me to think about was whether the entire enterprise of new year resolutions is itself a perfectionist shitshow (that’s my expression, not his - he was much more polite). You know, that whole ‘new year, new me’ thing, where we tell ourselves that the new year is still fresh and clean, unsullied by our failures, and we’re going to get it right this time. So, that’s something I addressed in that article - I’ll link to it in the episode notes in case you’re after some guidance about how to do new year resolutions in a healthy, imperfectionist way.
One thing that I got thinking about when writing that article was the risk that although new year resolutions, and efforts to make positive change in general, are good things - I mean, the clue is there in the expression ‘positive change’ - sometimes we make them for the wrong reasons. We think that we have to change for the better in order just to be acceptable. This sort of attitude can be unveiled when we slip up and don’t manage to implement our positive changes as perfectly as we’d like. When you fail to keep your resolutions, do you move on and say to yourself, with self-acceptance and self-compassion ‘Oh well, I’ll try again tomorrow, let me work out what I can do to make it easier for me to stick to my resolution next time’? Or do you say horrible things to yourself, like ‘I’m an idiot’, ‘Why do I even bother’, ‘This just proves I’m a failure’, ‘I’m going to give up even trying’? If you’re someone who says horrible things to yourself, there’s a bigger problem than simply failing to keep your new year resolutions. Your problem is that you don’t think you’re acceptable unless you’re excelling (and maybe not even then). Never mind the fact that excellence, by definition, requires more - much more - than being merely acceptable. You, incoherently, think that you’re either excellent (whatever ‘excellent’ means to you) or you’re a disappointing failure. And so, for you, making new year resolutions, or making other attempts to change for the better, isn’t about making an already good thing - i.e. you - even better. Instead, it’s just another battle in the exhausting war to convince yourself (and maybe others too) that you’re merely acceptable. Making new year resolutions, in these circumstances, is not a good or healthy thing. That war you’re fighting is doomed - you’ll never convince yourself that you’re acceptable, at least you won’t manage it by achieving great things, because you’re a goalpost-moving maniac, aren’t you? If any of this resonates with you, make your resolution for this year to work on your self-acceptance.
There’s a great article from The School of Life on this topic. It’s called ‘Overcoming the need to be exceptional’. It highlights a dark side of achievement, as being a mark of people who believe - to paraphrase the article - that they need to be extraordinary in order to deserve a place on the earth. Our culture and media often paint overachievers as people to admire and aspire to, but the author of this article - whose name is not given, as far as I can tell - argues that really the ones to admire and aspire to are those who are comfortable and content to live ordinary lives. The author suggests that - quote - ‘The world divides into the privileged who can be ordinary and the damned compelled to be remarkable’.
So, I have a question for you. Think of those new year resolutions you made, or think of any important goals you’ve set for yourself. Why are they important to you? By which I mean, what’s in it for you if you achieve them? And why does what’s in it for you matter? If you need help answering, try the 5 Whys exercise on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website. You could also try another approach to answering that question. Imagine not achieving your important goals. What would that be like? How would that make you feel? What would you think about yourself? How would you fill that gap in your life left by the unfulfilled goal? As you reflect on these things, there will perhaps be some aspects that are completely unsurprising to you. If it’s an important goal of yours to raise your children to be happy, well-balanced, kind, adults, the thought of not achieving this is upsetting, for reasons that are not at all mysterious - it’s important to us, after all, that those we love - and especially our children - do well. But maybe you’ll uncover some surprising attitudes too, especially about what we might call status-related goals. If your goal is to make full professor at a university of a certain calibre, or to get a certain type of grant, or to publish in a particular journal or with a particular publisher, you might find that the idea of not achieving this is inexplicably terrifying. You might even feel that you need to achieve this goal, that doing so would feed some deep seated hunger in you. Perhaps not achieving things like this would feel like rejection. A refusal to admit you into whatever gang of cool kids you’re desperate to impress. Consignment to the scrap heap. However you want to describe it. And yet, chances are, you are surrounded by people who you love and value, and who are not part of this cool gang. Your family and your friends. You don’t think they’re on the scrap heap. They don’t need to do anything to prove to you that they’re acceptable. But things are different when it comes to how you think of yourself. When you think of yourself, there are two options: either you’re a serial accumulator of Nobel Prizes and the like, or you may as well never have existed. Do you think there might be something unhealthy about your attitude to self improvement? And if so, what can you do about it?
Well, one thing you can do is scrutinise your new year resolutions, and any other goals you’re working towards. Work out why they’re important to you - the 5 Whys exercise I already mentioned is at your service here. If you find any whose importance boils down to ‘I need to achieve this to prove I’m not a worthless piece of shit’, give some serious thought to binning them. That might be tricky, because people are complex and messy and so are our lives and our goals, and there are often multiple reasons why a particular goal is important to us. Perhaps you’re working towards some qualification and it’s important to you because achieving it will be a way of earning your place on earth, but at the same time perhaps you also need the qualification in order to do your job, and we all need to pay the bills. It might not be a great idea to dump that goal, but perhaps you can work on coming round to the realisation that achieving this goal is not a measure of your worth. Try out viewing it the way you’d view it if it were a friend’s goal: you’d be pleased for your friend if they succeed, and you’d be disappointed for them if they fail, but whether they succeed or fail won’t change your views about their acceptability as a human. They’re already acceptable, right? That has nothing to do with their achievements.
Another thing you can do is go back and give yourself a refresher of episode #73: How to practise being instead of doing. You know, the episode where I tried to convince you that life shouldn’t be one non-stop hustle, and that it’s important to cultivate the skill - and it really is a skill - of being able to stop and just enjoy the moment. When was the last time you did that? Are you still capable of doing it, the way you were as a kid when you were lost in some activity you enjoyed? If not, don’t worry - you can rediscover it, and in that episode I offer some tips on how. The thing is, if you’ve forgotten how to just be, then it makes sense that you want to focus on what’s next: on whatever big goal you’re working towards, on what you’re going to become. Your present is empty - terrifyingly so - and so you’re looking to the future, and the idea of the future not turning out the way you want is terrifying because then you’re just left with the same sort of emptiness as the present. But your present isn’t really empty. You just need to learn to stop and listen to it, to tune in to what’s there.
I mean this lovingly, but I wish you a mediocre 2024. By that, I mean I wish you a year of peace and ease, in which you don’t feel pulled between achievement and annihilation. Whatever goals you might have chosen for this year, take a moment to look beyond them and ask: what are the things in my life that can bring me joy and contentment regardless of whether I achieve the big things? As the author of that School of Life article concludes, quote, ‘life’s true luxuries might comprise nothing more or less than simplicity, quiet, friendship based on vulnerability, creativity without an audience, love without too much hope or despair, hot baths and dried fruits, walnuts and dark chocolate’. I’ve long harboured a sneaky suspicion that nobody really likes dark chocolate, and only claim otherwise in order to sound sophisticated (I won’t be taking questions on this, by the way) - but you get the idea. For me, the little luxuries involve being curled up on the sofa doing some knitting surrounded by cats, walks with my kids, parkrun, surprise packages through the post, sitting on my own in a coffee shop with a novel, early mornings working in the library, and finding the teapot free of old leaves when I go to use it. What are your little luxuries? And, what can you do to cultivate them, to make time for them and enjoy them without telling yourself that you should be doing something else? These things are important, and they’re the things that will be there for you even if you decide - as I hope you might - that maybe you don’t need to be an overachievement engine after all. Life is richer than you think. Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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