All About 2018: How I Hit Mediocrity?

Before you ask any question, let me hit it up straight as to why I am writing this?

Since social media has become an evident part of our lives and we can’t deny that fact. Why not, make it a transparent platform? We choose to post the best picture of ourselves, choose to share the best things that happen to us, why not show the other side of the story?

Because somewhere down the line, people get impacted, influenced by the things we share. And if we share only the half-truth, that is not done.

In the recent past year, I have shared all my milestones, learning but chose not to share the bad parts of it because that’s not what we do in the social media platforms, right?

Everybody is happy there, everybody is killing it, living the life that they want, right?

And I did the same but as the year ends, I am here to tell you the flipped side of the story.

To get the full context of the “Why”, you will have to get the background of this first. So, a 2018 rewind is a must for that. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief.

So, here are the 2018 major highlights.

1. Got first-hand exposure to a metropolitan city and to the corporate sector.
2. Graduated.
3. Became truly financially independent.

And something good and then dramatic, also happened in my personal life as well that I don’t want to get into the details of because that will digress me from the main point.

Now that, while all of this was happening, I hit mediocrity and the worst part was I didn’t knew it until this realization happened recently, 2 or 3 days before and the following excerpt from a Facebook post made me think like this:

And let me tell you my definition of Mediocrity before I drill this down any further:

Mediocrity:

A state where you stop growing and learning. You remain the same what you were yesterday and the saga continues.

To me it felt like, I am killing it but I was not. It was a kind of mirage or something that I created around myself which in turn was not healthy for me.

Here are a few things that contributed majorly to the mediocrity:

Social media can be overwhelming:

I got overwhelmed by the social media engagement, the likes, the comments and shares and especially the appreciation.

Instead of looking at the impact side of it i.e what impact does my content creates and how to improve it further, I chose these metrics to look at and it failed me. I never grew.

Instead of looking at constructive feedback, I looked at the social selling metrics of LinkedIn.

I measured my success with the number of people I am able to reach. This is intimidating.

No doubt, all of this made me do more of it but I was doing the same stuff, every day and when you do the same stuff and never experiment with it, you fail to grow. I became comfortable with that because the audience was liking it.

And doing the same stuff every day is not progress, it’s a routine.

I didn’t even learn a single new word this year:

In the core of my heart, there lives “Expressing”. And to express what I feel, I currently make use of writing and I feel it’s an excellent medium to do that.

And this skill is something that I want to get better by each passing day. But since a year, my writing hasn’t improved a bit. If I look at how I used to write before, it’s still the same.

In fact, I haven’t even learned a single new word this year and it’s sad.

I did not do much in this that could elevate the level of writing.

I recorded audios but they all sounded as they used to before. Never experimented with content and truly lived in the comfort zone.

My productivity plummeted:

The same stuff that I could do in 2 hours is now taking me more than 8 hours to do because I get distracted way too often.

Procrastination took a toll on me and I failed at numerous avenues because of that:

I could have scaled up my blogs but failed to do so.

I failed at partnerships because more than just ideation, execution plays an important role.

In the last 2 quarters of 2018, I talked a lot about UX but could not make it to the place where I wanted to be. I learned some theoretical stuff here and there but did less practical stuff due to procrastination.

In a nutshell, I lost momentum in the last quarter of 2018. I was somehow not learning.

And yeah, these were the three major avenues that contributed to the mediocrity and now enough of going hard on myself, here are the silver linings despite all of this.

I networked:

I wanted to do networking because so far, I used to live in a small place where there were no such big opportunities to network. But I always wanted to meet new people and that is what I did.

Attended 5 meetups, took two personal interviews so far.

UXSprout:

For so long, I have struggled to have a long-term blog and here comes, UXSprout, which I started to validate whether I wanted to learn UX or not.

And so far so good.

Conclusion:

Key Learning:

1) Growth needs constant learning.
2) Procrastination takes you no where (Obviously, we all know that but still do).
3) Social media can make you overwhelm. It’s just a medium. Treat it that way.

I am responsible for all of my deeds and their consequences. These consequences are a result of my own shortcomings that I do not want to repeat and hence, I decided to write this piece, to remind me where I fall short because,

“In this world, you are allowed to make ’n’ number of mistakes but make sure that every mistake is a new one”.

I am not making any commitments for 2019 but certainly learning and growth would be the number one agenda.

Let’s hit refresh.

Open suggestions and feedback please.