Why Embracing Mediocrity Can Lead to Mastery

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get things right before allowing them to exist.

Writing has been particularly effective at exposing this habit because there is always something else you could fix. Another sentence to tighten. Another chapter to reconsider. Another round of research that will surely resolve whatever uncertainty is currently bothering you.

Eventually, perfectionism stops looking like high standards and starts looking suspiciously like procrastination with better branding.

There’s an uncomfortable argument for quantity over quality, at least while we’re learning something. The phrase sounds wrong because nobody wants to produce mediocre work on purpose. But the point isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to accept that doing something repeatedly is often how you develop the ability to meet them.

You write the awkward pages before you write the good ones. You play scales badly before your fingers know where to go. You take photographs that are technically fine and utterly boring before you begin to understand what makes an image work. Improvement needs material to work with, and perfectionism has a nasty habit of starving it.

I’m hardly the first person to notice this. Crispin Thurlow has made an argument for embracing mediocrity as part of learning, and Mark Manson has written from a different angle about loosening our grip on outcomes. Both get at something I’ve had to learn the annoying way: improvement requires enough attempts to actually improve from.

My husband learned a particularly brutal version of this in college when he was studying architecture. One assignment required sixteen drawings. He produced fifteen beautiful ones.

Fifteen.

He had spent so much time making each drawing excellent that he didn’t finish the assignment. The quality of what he completed didn’t erase the missing sixteenth drawing, and his grade reflected it. The experience stuck with him enough that he eventually changed majors, which sent his career in an entirely different direction.

I’ve thought about that story often because my instinctive sympathy has always been with the fifteen drawings. But look how good they are. The assignment, however, was sixteen.

There’s something useful in that distinction. Quality matters, but completion is also a skill. So is working within constraints. So is deciding when something has received enough of your time and letting it go.

Creative people can become especially good at pretending those decisions are beneath the nobler pursuit of making great work. I can always justify another pass because I care about quality. At some point, though, “I’m still improving it” can mean “I’m afraid to find out what happens when other people see it.”

Social media hasn’t exactly helped.

We spend a lot of time looking at finished products with no access to the pile of mediocre attempts underneath them. We see the published novel, the successful business, the beautiful painting, the effortless performance. We usually don’t see version three, the abandoned idea, the embarrassing first draft, the project that consumed six months and quietly died in a folder.

Then we compare someone else’s finished work to our own construction site and wonder why we feel behind.

I’m increasingly convinced that mastery looks much less glamorous from the inside. It’s repetition. Experimentation. Getting things wrong often enough that you start recognizing why they’re wrong. It’s accumulating judgment, which is hard to do if you refuse to produce anything until you already possess it.

That doesn’t mean I’ve become a champion of sloppy work. I still care enormously about getting things right. If anything, becoming a better writer has made me more aware of how much craft matters.

What has changed is my willingness to let imperfect work be part of getting there.

A bad page can be revised. A bad idea can teach you why it failed. A finished project gives you information that the perfect project living indefinitely in your head never will.

Sometimes you need another pass.

Sometimes you need to send the sixteenth drawing.

Knowing which moment you’re in may be the real skill.