The Cult of Mediocrity

Recently, I listened to an episode of the "Founders" podcast about focus and finding your life's work that resonated deeply with me and sparked considerable reflection on the topic of "mediocrity" and how it seems to be accepted in modern society.

Sometimes I wrestle with the realisation of my own "mediocrity" and have days where at the end of the day you realise this wasn't enough, this was not good enough. This idea of my own mediocrity fills me with disgust, but also drives me relentlessly towards a better tomorrow.

I'm not writing this to judge anyone's life choices, but I'll be honest: I can't maintain meaningful friendships with what the podcast host David Senra called "Casual People." There's something fundamentally incompatible about spending time with those who've made peace with mediocrity when you're on a mission to eliminate it from your life. This isn't arrogance—it's survival.

They normalise the very thing I’m trying to escape. I know the pursuit of excellence doesn't have a happy ending. It's an endless chase toward a better future, a form of productive discontent that never truly resolves. Most well-adjusted people would call this unhealthy.

But it's exactly that chase that makes everything worthwhile.

I feel like this internal battle against mediocrity reflects a broader cultural phenomenon—one that's particularly visible in modern Europe's embrace of comfort over achievement.

In Germany, the average workweek stands at 33.9 hours—let that sink in: 33.9 hours. And these aren’t hours filled with focused, meaningful labor; we’re talking leisurely one-hour lunches, at least four extended coffee breaks, two daily meetings that should’ve been emails, 200 pointless notifications flooding a Teams chat crowded with 45 people (of whom perhaps three actually contribute), and at least two dozen checks to see who viewed your latest Instagram story.

But it doesn’t end there. On average, Germans also take about 10 sick days annually, atop a generous 23 days of paid vacation. Factor in public holidays, and in places like Austria, you’re easily looking at upwards of 38 vacation days per year. A report by the IW (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), a German economic think tank, estimates that in 2023 employers in Germany spent €77 billion on sick leave.

I’ve long believed that the prevailing work ethic in most traditional organisations is fundamentally broken—and perhaps that’s acceptable. After all, startups exist precisely to expose the complacency, inefficiency, and sheer uselessness embedded in these legacy institutions.

This lack of work ethic, coupled with a herd mentality of contentment and lack of ambition has led to a culture where if you’re questioning the status quo, or are willing to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of excellence you are the odd one out, you are the misfit, the one that is looked at with disdain rather than admiration.

The majority—the Casual People—have created a system that rewards their own mediocrity and punishes anyone who threatens their comfortable equilibrium.

Current data suggests we can only maintain focus on one screen for 47 seconds at a time. How can we achieve greatness in 47-second intervals? Deep work—the kind that produces breakthrough innovations—requires sustained focus for hours, not seconds. Writing complex code, designing elegant solutions, or mastering any craft demands the ability to hold intricate concepts in working memory for extended periods—cognitive work that's impossible when your mind resets every 47 seconds.

I'm not here to blame social media companies for our attention crisis. In fact, they've done exactly what I'm advocating: they achieved mastery through relentless focus and obsessive attention to detail. They studied human psychology, ran thousands of experiments, and built products that work exactly as designed. They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and advertisers, and they've executed it flawlessly.

The problem isn’t the companies or products - it’s our complete abdication of personal responsibility. No one is forcing you to pick up your phone 228 times a day. No one is making you scroll through TikTok for three hours. No one is compelling you to check Instagram stories during deep work sessions.

We love to cry for government regulation, platform accountability, or digital wellness features because it's easier than admitting the uncomfortable truth: we lack the discipline to control our own behaviour. Protecting children is a separate conversation requiring different considerations, but for adults? There's no excuse.

But the attention crisis goes much deeper, in my opinion—it’s not just that we lack attention; it’s what we’re training our attention to seek. Social media has created a generation optimising for likes rather than mastery, for perception rather than performance. When young people aspire to be influencers rather than inventors, we’ve fundamentally redirected human ambition away from the patient, obsessive focus that creates breakthrough innovation.

Excellence requires humility and an ability to see your own flaws clearly—the kind of disgust with mediocrity that drives improvement. Narcissism is the opposite: it's about maintaining an image rather than confronting reality. When narcissism becomes a societal value, we optimise for appearing successful rather than becoming excellent.

I love the quote by Thomas Edison and have it written down in my notebook probably about a hundred times.

The iPhone emerged because Steve Jobs was disgusted with existing phones - he called the BlackBerry keyboard “shit” and couldn’t stomach another plastic device that felt “cheap and cheerful”. Elon Musk founded SpaceX after calculating that rocket fuel costs $200,000 but launches cost $60 million—a gap so absurd it offended his engineering sensibilities and drove him to attempt what Boeing and Lockheed deemed impossible.

This mindset reveals a fundamental truth: progress demands perpetual unease—a belief that there is always something better, smarter, more elegant just beyond our current grasp. The legendary former Intel CEO Andy Grove understood this when he wrote Only the Paranoid Survive, recognising that the moment you're satisfied with your product, someone hungrier is already building your replacement.

Great products and innovations didn't emerge from creative thinking sessions but from existential discontent with reality itself—from founders whose fundamental inability to accept "good enough" bordered on the pathological.

Europe has systematically created a culture that would have medicated Jobs' disgust, regulated Musk's obsession, and HR-trained Grove's paranoia right out of existence.

Excellence to me is maniacal focus on becoming the best at a very specific task. But here's what most people don't understand: True mastery requires a level of focus that looks pathological to observers. While you're obsessing over millisecond improvements to your product, your peers are debating which designer wallet to buy. While you're working 16-hour days because you can't stop thinking about the problem, they're planning their next vacation. While you're reading technical papers at 2 AM, they're checking whose Instagram story got the most views.

This kind of focus makes you a social misfit. People will call you obsessed, unbalanced, unhealthy. They'll question your priorities because your single-minded pursuit of excellence makes them uncomfortable about their own scattered mediocrity. This is why maintaining relationships with Casual People becomes impossible—your intensity reflects back their own lack of purpose, making every interaction a reminder of what they've chosen not to pursue.

True excellence requires not just ignoring what others think, but being fundamentally incapable of caring about their opinion when you're in pursuit of something greater.

Building anything meaningful requires repeated failure. Your first product launch will flop. Your initial market assumptions will be wrong. Investors will reject you dozens of times. Each failure feels personal, devastating—and that's when most people quit. But as Steve Jobs understood:.

This kind of perseverance through repeated failure makes you unemployable in traditional European work culture, where avoiding risk and maintaining 'work-life balance' are the highest virtues. The very obsession that creates breakthrough companies is precisely what HR departments are designed to filter out.

Real change won't come from governments drunk on four-day work week fantasies and DEI consultants. While Brussels debates mandatory vacation minimums and "right to disconnect" laws, breakthrough companies must create performance-led islands within Europe's comfort-oriented culture.

This means fundamentally rejecting European HR orthodoxy. Hire for obsession, overpay for talent (it’s worth it), promote based on results, not tenure or diversity quotas. Fire fast when someone can't handle the intensity. Be willing to lose "work-life balance" advocates to gain breakthrough performers who understand that greatness requires sacrifice.

European labor laws make this harder - work councils, mandatory consultation periods, endless protection for mediocre employees. But the companies that navigate these restrictions while maintaining performance standards are the ones that will survive. The rest will continue bleeding talent to cultures that reward obsession over balance.

The cure exists, but it requires choosing excellence over comfort. Most won't make that choice. And perhaps that's the real tragedy - not that Europe can't compete, but that it has consciously chosen not to.

This piece will likely generate strong reactions - that's the point. Whether you think I'm completely wrong or spot-on, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Reach out if you want to discuss.