I’m not awesome. At least, not any more than any other human. Or indeed, any other plant or animal. Or rock.
The other day I tweeted: “Be mediocre. Awesomeness doesn’t scale”.
This is 2 sentences. One part is weak trolling, the other part is a genuine plea to set aside our narcissism and build some stuff that is sustainable.
Louise Kidney: responded -> “be mediocre????? how depressing ;O(” … “Rome didn’t get built cos someone settled for mediocrity.” … “If we all wander around going ‘frak it, don’t be awesome’ there’d be no athletes, no visionaries, no boundaries broken…and the world would be boring, 1 dimensional, samey, sheep herding awfulness.” She also linked to this passionate defence of her position: http://louquietly.tumblr.com/post/20643056805/aspire which is typically forthright and well argued. I like Louise a lot. She knows who she is.
But a) that’s only responding to my first sentence, not the second. And b) I’m not her. I couldn’t give a monkeys about athletics. Vision is nothing without execution. If we all lived like Amish, would we be happier? Quite possibly. If Rome had never been built, sure I wouldn’t be sat here typing this: if everything was different nothing would be the same. And other insipid truisms.
Maybe I’m getting old, but I like silence. http://icerunner.co.uk/2012/01/the-value-of-nothing/
I quite like “boring, 1 dimensional, samey, sheep herding awfulness” sometimes. Because there’s more to “sitting here” than some might think. Check out these pictures of people before and after a meditation retreat: http://www.utne.com/The-Sweet-Pursuit/The-Meditation-Makeover-Before-and-After.aspx
I like simplicity. I like the feeling of working in a team. Being part of something bigger than me. Being a small cog is a bigger machine. I want stuff that lasts when the cool kids have moved on. I want everyone else to benefit, not just the hipsters.
But more than all that I want stuff that scales globally. I want to help build stuff that everyone can use for ever. I don’t want to be chasing my own dreams on my own. I don’t want to stand out and be awesome.
If I have to sit in meetings all day nudging things forward inch by painful inch rather than being the swashbuckling, disruptive Lone Ranger to make that happen? Ok then.
Don’t climb higher than your angels can fly. Or something.
Martin Howitt's blog 
Hi Martin, that’s a thought provoking post.
Maybe I should meditate more but it comes down to this for me thought summed up best by Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham: ‘You get three ants together, they can’t do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral.’
That happens to be my favourite film. There a lot of words of wisdom in it (at least as far as I’m concerned), you can find some more of them here http://bit.ly/Hhxmjk)
I’m part of a team building something sustainable and scaleable. Something where the code is shared and free to reuse. I am passionate about working for the team, being part of the team, and providing the platforms and training for that team to communicate across and communicate well.
If I do my job properly, I will not be needed in my post. So hopefully someone somewhere else will want me to make myself redundant.
But part of being able to contribute to the team is refusing to be mediocre. It’s refusing to tread water. It’s making sure I’m as awesome as I can be to contribute to the overall team awesomeness.
Perhaps we don’t define awesomeness or mediocrity the same way. Cos you’re about as far from mediocre, as it is possible to be.
My original tweet was certainly not aimed at you or what your team/organisation/movement are doing – far from it. That stuff is really essential and shows a whole bunch of us the way forward.
I’m taking aim at individualism over collectivism and at progress at the expense of sustainability. I’ve seen “rock star” coders who never documented anything, “disrupters” who never left anything but mess behind them, and *entire industries* that cough up nothing but solutions for problems they themselves created by being “innovative”.
Yes, we define these things differently 🙂
Perhaps I don’t always choose my words carefully enough.