Mediocrity is the key to success

Here's the thing. I wanna say something maybe this is for young people, people who are just starting their life, thinking about what they wanna do, what they wanna be, and so on. Maybe you look at, like, celebrities. Right? High profile people in the media, popular people, people with a large audience, and so on.

And maybe you think I'd kinda like to be like that. I'd kinda like to have what they have. I'd like to be in their in their place. So listen. Let me just disabuse you of the misconception that people who are very popular, people who have a wide audience and high profile with celebrities and so on, the misconception that those people are special or particularly talented in any way because that's not how it actually works.

You do not get popular. You do not get a wide audience. You don't move up the ranks in any monetized ranking system except by having an absolute commitment to mediocrity because mediocrity has the broadest appeal. It's the most relatable thing. Mediocrity resonates with a far larger number of people than being highly skilled, highly intelligent, highly gifted and talented and so on.

The higher the degree of your excellence in any given skill, field of study, area of knowledge, talent, or whatever, the higher the degree of your level of skill and excellence, the fewer people there will be who appreciate you or who even can appreciate you because this is just the mathematics of it all. Many people are highly skilled, have expertise, are very talented in a particular thing. And in every other area, they're completely mediocre. So on the one hand, they're not in a position to actually judge who's really good at something, and on the other hand, they probably won't like it or understand it. In any given audience or any given, pool of potential consumers of content, the overwhelming majority of those people will be mediocre in the area of that content.

So they will automatically gravitate towards anyone in that area of content who is also mediocre because mediocrity is comfortable, mediocrity is familiar, mediocrity is relatable, it's understandable. If you're too special, if you're too talented, if you're too skilled, if you're if you have too much expertise, it's alienating. It's estranging because normal people can't relate to it. We're talking about if you want a wide audience. So if your area of expertise or your talent or your skill or your gift or your area of knowledge matters to you, then it has to matter to you more than aspiring to have a large audience because the mathematics make it impossible for you to be both excellent in a field and have a large audience, or to be popular or to be high profile or to become a celebrity in that area.

There isn't really such a thing as a popular celebrity who is actually the best at what they do with the possible exception of athletes. So if the thing you're good at matters to you, then don't worry about having a large audience and don't worry about being successful in those terms. Measure your success by your actual excellence and know that the more excellent you are at something, the fewer people will appreciate it. But you could decide, I would rather have the big audience, I would rather have the celebrity than to be excellent at what I do, which okay, that's a choice you can make. And you have to learn how to make your skill or your knowledge or your talent or your area of expertise as palatable as possible to the general audience who have no expertise in that field.

Make it trite. Make it mediocre. Make it nothing new, nothing original, nothing creative. I mean, you can look at people, like, example, I don't mean to pick on it, but say Jordan Peterson. Or it may be a better example, be Andrew Tate.

I had somebody comment in the comment section on one of my videos. If you tolerate everything, then you stand for nothing. Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate said that. No.

He didn't. That's an old saying. Like, it wouldn't surprise me if someone like Andrew Tate again, I'm not don't mean to pick on him. Anybody could could do this. Take a book of quotes.

Take a book of famous quotations. Right? Run every quote through an AI paraphrasing tool. Write a book of little truisms that you pretending that you came up with. Just take classic timeless quotes and run it through a paraphrasing AI tool and pass it off as your own, and everybody will think you're a genius because you're saying nothing that's new.

Now it's one of the criticisms of someone like Jordan Peterson that anything that he says that's new doesn't make sense, and anything he says that makes sense isn't new. This is a key to success. If you wanna be a successful musician, use the same chords that everybody else is using, the same beat, the same track, the same everything that everybody else is using, and you can be successful. If you wanna be a famous personality, be famous for your personality, then you just imitate someone else's personality who's already famous so that people recognize it and they gravitate towards it because it reminds them of something else. This is what I'm saying.

Mediocrity rises in popularity. Specialness, uniqueness, real talent, real expertise absolutely plummets in popularity. So don't ever think that you can have both. You really can't. And the truth is that the people who are really the best at what they do, you're not gonna see them.

You're not gonna see them on the media. You're not gonna see them on social media. You're not gonna see them around because they're too busy with what they're doing and interacting with people at their level in their field who can appreciate them. They don't have YouTube channels. They don't have TikTok channels.

You know? So if you wanna be really good at something, don't think about having appreciation. And if you wanna have appreciation, then forget about trying to be good at anything.