I am mediocre.
I am not the smartest, nor the fastest, nor the most passionate. Being the best student in my high school class meant nothing. There are millions of other top students all across the globe, probably thousands just in my country. In comparison to them, I'm just average. And maybe that's ok.
Maybe I don't have to have landed a FAANG role a few weeks post my final university exam. Maybe its OK that there's a likelihood that I will graduate with a second class honors and not a first. Maybe my fear of mediocrity is the reason why I have not done anything at all, let alone something mediocre.
This week I was struck with this blatant fact while revisiting my Khan Academy Calculus work. I had to actually put in effort. I failed multiple quizzes and had to go through the material multiple times to pass. I've never had to do that before. It's a painful experience realizing that the one thing you had pride in, your intellect, is actually nothing special. But I'm glad I worked through it. I'm glad I didn't give up. I'm glad I cried yet got up the next day and kept practicing. I'll probably still be jobless 6 months from now. Considering the job market, I'd be extremely fortunate to land a role (not freelancing) before the end of the year. But if I don't give up, I'll still be content with that, hopefully.
As mentioned, this week I revisited some differential calculus work. I completed the Statistics and Probability work I had set out to do in my previous post as well as Kaggle's Computer Vision course. I was also able to build the frontend for my freelance project (I am realizing the toughest part of freelancing is working with the client and not really the development. Though, the fact that I am so grateful for the job kinda helps me through that)
As for this coming week, my goals are:
- Khan Academy's Statistics and Probability: Displaying and comparing quantitative data - Describing and comparing distributions
- Make a submission to Kaggle's Getting Started: TPUs + Cassava Leaf Disease competition
- Complete my client's backend
That's all.
Top comments (1)
The shift you're describing — from "I've always been near the top effortlessly" to "I actually have to struggle through this material" — is one of the most important developmental moments in any engineer's life, and almost nobody talks about it honestly.
What you're experiencing with the calculus isn't a sign that you're mediocre. It's a sign that you've finally hit the edge of where natural ability alone carries you, which means the real learning is starting. The people who never experience this until they're deep in a career tend to develop fragile confidence — they're capable until the first truly hard problem, then they fold because they've never built the actual muscle of working through difficulty.
Fear of mediocrity causing inaction is genuinely worse than mediocrity itself. At least mediocre output exists. Keep going with the calculus — the struggling is the process, not evidence that you can't do it.