An adequate life

More than ten years years ago, I blogged about being in the twilight of a mediocre career.  No, that's not the reason that I am likely to be fired from my job; that's an entirely different matter.

Of course, I know that my life has not been mediocre.  I have had an awesome life, and an awesome career, mostly thanks to dumb luck and the fact that I chose my parents well.

Life is not about excellence.  I always tell students that it is alright if they don't earn the highest grades--in my classes or anywhere.  There are no "A"s in real life, I often tell them.  And even if we are excellent at some small aspect, we are incompetent with the infinity that is the rest is. 

I tell them that life is about giving the fullest to anything that we do. Whether it is chores at home, or the classes that we take, or whatever.  And even embrace our failures because, well, we cannot be good in everything.

I am sure that most students do not care for such a message. For one, all the other "elders" tell them a completely different thing, and I come across as a raving lunatic with a strange accent.  For another, if somebody had told me such stuff when I was twenty years old, I would have immediately dismissed that.  It is with age and experience that we gain such insights.  Wisdom arrives way too late in life!

A history professor at Cornell writes in praise of mediocrity.  "We should learn to give mediocrity the love it deserves. The first step is to rebrand it. I prefer to call it "adequacy."

I agree.

For me as a teacher, to honor adequacy is not to discount the individual excellence of particular students, but to appreciate the collective excellence that can occur even when some students are merely adequate. When I started teaching, I judged the success of a course by how many students wrote brilliant papers — which meant I was always disappointed.
Now I judge it by the quality of the conversation in the room: Did students listen and respond? Did the conversation build on itself? Was there enough disagreement to keep the discussion interesting yet enough common understanding of the subject and questions at hand to keep it focused? In short, did we make interesting intellectual music together?

And,

Let’s drop the exhortations to fail or suck at something and instead cultivate the adequacy mind-set — the feeling of being proud and grateful to be good enough to continue doing something from which we get pleasure and knowledge.

Yes!

It does not mean that we should not strive for excellence.  Life will be a lot more enjoyable if we celebrate our adequacy at most of what we do.