In praise of mediocrity – and having a crack regardless
Idea
There’s something I’ll never forget about an occasion when I met Donald Trump in 2016, when he was running for president and trying to persuade him: New York Times To support her, he began a sentence with: “My beauty…”
I don’t remember how the sentence ended because I was so struck by the audacity of the way it began. Australians never talk seriously like this. In a way, I admire arrogance. Although he was big and flashy, he was intelligent. Maybe we should all recognize our own beauty, steal it, and proclaim the beauty of others as well.
This can be a struggle for the humble.
But lately I’ve been thinking the exact opposite of this saying; Not my beauty, but my ordinariness. Stuff that I’m generally pretty terrible at, but I still enjoy it. Or things I was once bad at but have gotten better at over time. When I spoke at a girls’ school speech night recently, I found myself wanting to tell them to embrace being average in a world full of AI knockoffs and filtered avatars.
The rise of the robotic mind will make it increasingly important that we embrace messy, chaotic human creativity. And many children feel the pressure to come into the world polished, fully formed, even perfected.
So, as we pant for air towards the end of 2025, hands on our knees, sucking in the air, it might be time to remind ourselves that Australia’s great tradition of “having a crack” is a good one to nurture and encourage. Not because you will win, be successful, or even be noticed, but because joy can be found even when swimming in a sea of mediocrity. Or just starting from somewhere, anywhere.
Let me give you a few examples from my own life.
A few weeks ago, I went back through my school diaries to see what I wrote back then. Turns out it was mostly boys, my friends, books, mostly boys and occasionally politicians. Unfortunately, I was also writing a lot of poetry. I love poetry – and at the time I was particularly devoted to Judith Wright, Kenneth Slessor and Alfred Tennyson – but my poetry was chillingly bad.
For some reason crystals have been mentioned many times. It was dramatic, often melancholy, and also boring. It’s a great reminder that it’s better to train your eyes outward and observe the world, rather than devoting yourself primarily to analyzing your own—rather boring, in retrospect—emotions. At that time, I even started to feel sorry for the male friends I tormented.
Here are a few pieces to give you a taste. A poem was named Spiritual Rattleto start:
Crystallized melancholy glow/Beam dreams/Isolate feelings of screaming/Then everything went silent…/Empty…grey
Cheerful huh? This is truly painful to write.
That’s the title of another gem, written at a time when I was obsessed with William Lane’s failed attempt to establish a “New Australia” utopia in Paraguay: Written on the Phone:
Crystallized visions/A utopian future/Always out of reach of one’s dirty fingers/Maybe a mirage/Or maybe we can’t reach far enough/Our arms are too short.
This is evil. And don’t I look like a total hoot? A bomb of happiness. When I started writing in my teenage years, I was serious, too serious, and my work was underwritten.
Still, I always wanted to be a writer and kept going, despite the dodgy output. I wasn’t writing for myself – or a judgmental future self who would embarrass me like I’m doing now – I was writing for myself because I was trying to figure things out.
And I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, not because it was good but because I had to and wanted to – diaries and letters and essays and dissertations, and eventually I was healed. First I wrote articles, then books and had them published. This happened because I started somewhere, enjoyed it and kept going.
A second example: I always swim in the ocean. I go alone with my mermaid friends in different groups, and it has become a practice that sustains me through the toughest times. It taught me to slow my breathing, pay more attention to the seafloor, watch the ebb and flow, swells, and moods of the waves, and that daily rituals like these can keep you calm and strong. I see this as part of a personal quest for awe, a sense of smallness in a vast and magnificent universe.
I wrote columns, books, made documentaries about this, and made people desensitized to it. Everywhere I go in Australia, on the NSW South Coast and Margaret River, in Hobart, Portsea and Adelaide, people invite me to swim in wild and beautiful places, and when I do I never regret it.
But I’m not a good swimmer. As with many things, my excitement far exceeds my ability. I’ve never won a swim meet, and I don’t think I’ve even made it to the final. I’m pretty slow, my stroke doesn’t seem to add much to my speed, and as long as I work on it I’ll never swim in front of a pack. But I love it! It gives me endless joy and pleasure and I do it whenever I get the chance.
In short: who cares?
Some complained that the pursuit of perfection devalued the world of pleasure. In other words, people tend to avoid taking up hobbies because they worry they will treat them badly.
So let me sound the trumpet of mediocrity this year. The worse you are at something, the better you can make those around you feel! Can you even get better yourself? And if all else fails and you actually fail, at least you’ll have had a damn good time.
Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. His last book is Shining Bright: How elegance changes everything.
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Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. His latest book is Bright Shining: How elegance changes everything.Connect with: excitement, Facebook or email.
