Screwing up is bad news. After all, it’s a mistake. But according to one blogger, there is a fate far worse than error.
This comes from a writer at the website OnStartups.com:
Here’s the big lesson: Many founders think that the worst outcome you can have in a startup is failure. You try something and it fails. And yes, failing sucks. But, what’s worse than failing is going sideways for years and years. Being stuck in a quagmire of mediocrity. Things are going reasonably well, but not spectacularly well. The reason mediocrity sucks more than failure is very simple: Failure lets you move on, mediocrity stalls you and keeps you from reaching your potential.
Writer Dharmesh Shah has gone viral with this post. So much so, he even added an update with a powerful quote from Tim O’Relly:
Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.
Failure is the secret to success. But mediocrity is a special kind of failure: it’s one that is not definitive enough to feel like you are really doing anything wrong. If you are just getting by, you may never have the experience of doing it wrong so that you want to stop and start over.
Watch out for doing something only well enough that it doesn’t actually matter.