Mediocrity Principle

Mediocrity Principle does not tell you what to do. It tells you what not to forget while you do it.

Applied daily, it changes less than you hope and more than you expect. That is how principles work — unglamorous, cumulative, and visible only in photographs taken years apart.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

In any Indian office there is one person who knows where everything is, whom to call, and how things actually get done. The organisation chart does not show this person. Reality does.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. The name is new; the wisdom stood at bus stops long before either of us.