How to be mediocre
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Not everyone can be special, so should we embrace our mediocrity?
In a programme first broadcast in August 2016, Manuela Saragosa investigates the appeal of being average. She talks to mediocrity advocates and bloggers Krista O'Reilly-Davi-Digui from Alberta in Canada, and Mark Manson in the US. But what happens when whole societies embrace mediocrity at the expense of excellence? Italian philosopher Gloria Origgi explains the concept of "kakonomics'" - the economics of being bad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:10.5 | In this edition, the top-selling business books are always about how to become more productive, more successful. |
| 0:16.9 | But for every winner, there are plenty more people and companies that are just average. |
| 0:21.7 | So if that's how most of us live, why does mediocrity get such a bad rap? |
| 0:27.3 | We're just constantly exposed to kind of like the highlight reel of people's lives |
| 0:32.2 | that I think a lot of people, particularly younger people, are getting kind of mixed up. |
| 0:37.7 | Or does mediocrity translate into bad economics? |
| 0:42.6 | All this rhetoric of efficiency is just like unbearable, so people like to have chances to... |
| 0:48.7 | To ease up. |
| 0:49.6 | ...ease up, exactly. |
| 0:51.8 | That's all coming up here on Business Daily. |
| 0:58.7 | On a bright spring day in 2012, David McCullough, Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in a Boston suburb, |
| 1:07.4 | stepped onto a podium on the school's football field to address that year's class of graduating students. |
| 1:13.5 | His message was blunt. |
| 1:15.5 | None of you is special. |
| 1:19.1 | You're not special. |
| 1:21.5 | You're not exceptional. |
| 1:23.4 | He went on. |
| 1:24.9 | You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. |
| 1:28.3 | If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. |
| 1:32.3 | In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another, |
| 1:36.3 | which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, |
... |
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