Over the years we have all heard the aphorisms:
Dare to be bad.
Nobody’s perfect.
You can’t edit a blank page.
Dance like no one is watching.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
All of these, and many more, urge you to allow yourself the luxury of not being perfect, not being (as I said elsewhere) The Smartest Guy in the Room. Even Weird Al Yankovic added his own take in 1986, “Dare to Be Stupid.”
But there is one other thing we can dare: we can dare to be mediocre.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe creative people sincerely want to improve. We want our paintings, books, pastries, flower gardens, quilts, and so on to be better as we gain experience. We want to improve our skills, to tackle more complicated projects, to progress as we practice.
But to get there we have to try new things, and for that we need to give ourselves the freedom to fall on our faces. To completely fail, whether sadly or spectacularly.
I would call this spectacular - considering the car and the road are on opposite sides of the row of trees. (Hint: It actually rolled down from the road where the picture was taken.)
Sometimes that failure is going to be in front of others. We have to learn that that’s okay, and most of us seem to get that lesson, to understand and even accept that we will experience failure.
The problem often comes at some point between abject failure and glorious (or even moderate) success.
The problem comes with mediocrity.
Each of us can define success for ourselves. We can determine what a successful creation will look and feel like for each of us. Is success completing a project? Staging a show? Treating your family to a new dish? Polishing your knife skills? (This is one I really, really want to do. Working next door to a restaurant kitchen and watching the professional chefs do prep work makes me want to be able to pick up a knife and produce perfectly chopped vegetables.)
We can accept early failures, we can expect to fail at things when we are starting out, and I would argue that accepting complete failure is easier to do.
But that uneven middle ground? That’s tough.
The rough middle ground may slow you down, but keep moving forward and things will get better.
For starters, you’ve learned enough to know what you don’t know. Enough to see that you’ve made progress, you aren’t completely failing. But you’ve also learned enough to see how far off the mark you are.
For example, your writing no longer has misspellings and grammar mistakes and you can string together sentences that make sense. But your story is boring and your characters feel more like paper dolls than real people. A few months ago you wouldn’t have been able to see those problems because you were still learning the basics. Now you’ve achieved some level of mediocrity – and it may feel even worse than failure. Now you can see how far you have to go, and you can lose sight of how far you have come.
Another example, one I know all too well. You have mastered the basics of knit and purl, you can even do a cable, or shape a sleeve. But when you manage to get all the pieces knitted there is no way they can be assembled into an actual sweater that will fit a human body. You try to stitch the thing together and wonder if it was meant to be worn by your dog. Or maybe an alien with an extra arm or something.
These are steps along the way to some level of mastery, and while they may feel like nothing, but they are not. They are the baby steps that we all take when we try something new. They are part of the progression from idea to execution, and they are necessary.
Fail.
Fail better.
Don’t fault yourself for your mediocrity, revel in it. Allow it to be a part of your journey. It is the bridge between bad and better and it can’t be rushed. Or avoided.
Step out onto that bridge and keep moving.