I came to a blistering realization about this: excellence wants to do, mediocrity wants to be. It's pretty evident. People who are doing excellent things are to

I came to a blistering realization about this: excellence wants to do, mediocrity wants to be. It's pretty evident. People who are doing excellent things are too busy in the action (flow) to obsess over others' perceptions, while mediocre people (most) have to manage their own social acceptability and success within an established permission system. You can really only have one or the other. You can deep-dive and go for excellence, or you can stay at the surface and be constantly attuned to others' perceptions of you, your work, and your position in society... but you can't be in two places at once. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/careerism-breeds-mediocrity/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/careerism-bre... From that essay: Mediocrity wants to “be smart” and for everyone to know it. Excellence wants to do smart things. Mediocrity wants to be well-liked. Excellence wants to create things worth liking. Mediocrity wants to be one of the great writers. Excellence wants to write great works. Right. But as Kefka said, "You sound like chapters from a self-help booklet!" Everyone can get behind these ideas-- it's a nice pep talk-- but you're actually going to end up in opposition to society if you try to live that way. It's hard. People in power will try to beat the crap out of you. If you really insist on doing great things, you should expect to pay for it. Trying to do great things at work injects a lot of job-loss risk that most people can't stand; trying to do great things outside of work requires discipline that most people don't have. It's never "too late". We don't understand the brain, with regard to aging, very well and have no idea when a healthy person's creativity or cognitive power peaks-- it's somewhere between 15 and 70, but highly individualized-- which is another way of saying that there isn't a meaningful enough difference for us to know. (It's like a world in which unfair coins turn up heads 50.000001% of the time; it will take an ungodly amount of time to determine whether a coin is fair or unfair, but it just doesn't matter.) "Too late" is not what one should be worried about. Peoples' perceptions of us change dramatically as we get older. When you're 40, you can no longer exploit the chickenhawking of a corporate middle-manager who did his 20s wrong and wants to live vicariously through someone more sociable and attractive than him, which makes becoming his protege impossible... but, by the time you're 40, you really shouldn't want that. How we're perceived changes dramatically from 20 to 25 to 30 to 40. What we can do (in terms of creativity, courage, integrated understanding) seems to be increasing monotonically until very close to the end of life. Really, though, "being awesome" is the wrong goal. The discussion should be around "doing awesome".