The mediocrity

Do you have a personal roll-on deodorant? I don’t know how intimate you think something like a roll-on deodorant is.

I used to be very protective of my little private space, until the kids started treating my perfume, toothpaste, and yes, my roll-on deodorant, as common property. Eventually, my wife took away my brush, and I now hide my facial hair razor. I only cut it down to 0.4mm, in case anyone wants to know, it irritates the skin less.

Today it was already bad in the morning, because I realize more and more that I’m only average, so three minus.

I put the roll-on deodorant upside down in the bathroom. I use it with the best wife I’ve ever had, without any official agreement. It was almost empty, and if it was mine, I would have thrown it away and gotten a new one. But it’s only half mine, so I can’t have half of my wife’s. That’s misleading, I mean, unfortunately you can’t get rid of half of a roll-on deodorant.

In general, mediocrity is becoming more and more common. That goes for Martin, the management and unfortunately also for the music. The „M“ seems to be especially affected.

„As a teenager, Christian Sewing lived in Bünde near Bielefeld, played a lot of tennis and was interested in soccer. At school, however, he did not excel. The son of the owner of a small printing company, he graduated from high school with a 2.4 grade point average. Today, Sewing is the head of Deutsche Bank,“ wrote the WELT four years ago. If you want to make it to the top, you don’t have to start so early; maybe mediocrity is a much better preparation for higher tasks. Or does mediocrity simply prevail?

„As a top manager, you have to be very good with people,“ says Christine Stimpel, a partner at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. „That’s the only way you can be successful in large organizations.“

Exactly, and that may be the most important thing: people skills.

„People who were always very good in school never had to deal with their own failures and tend to be perfectionists.“

Well, life doesn’t end when you graduate from high school, but failure is certainly a very useful institution, as you can see with Thomas Tuchel and FC Bayern Munich after three defeats. Soccer can be very educational. I’m really starting to like you, Bayern.

The former Telekom boss was only a mediocre student, as one hears, and this information is not often easily accessible. For example, I can’t imagine Donald Trump mastering the rule of three, but I have an eye for it. With Putin, on the other hand, I can imagine him destroying the calculator if he doesn’t like the result. Both cases of very bad mediocrity with greedy hands and words full of lies. Unfortunately without any human element. Both have already been described as „entertaining“, but this ability only serves selfish purposes and not the other.

Sometimes the reason for asking about final grades in interviews is to see how a candidate handles the question when their grades are not so good. It is not always about the actual grade, such as when applying to college. You can gain understanding for sports successes outside of school or volunteer work. I am convinced that this often counts for more than a better grade.


I don’t know much about „mediocrity“ in music, I’m just a listener.

What do Taylor Swift, Lorde, St. Vincent, Lana Del Rey and to some extent Pink have in common? One guy who produces their music!

Jack Antonoff is a musician and was mediocre at best with his bands fun and Bleachers, but that’s not what he’s known for. The fact that he was friends with his classmate Scarlett Johansson when he was 17 is not important, nor is his long relationship with Lena Dunham from 2012-2018. What is perhaps more important is that he is good with people, especially women. He almost exclusively produces women.

Since his collaboration with Taylor Swift in 2013, things have been going uphill. On Lorde’s Melodrama, it was said somewhere that he „uses empty space to spectacular effect as the arrangements shift from stark clarity to delirium“. I don’t hear that. He also produced Lana Del Rey in 2019. He has won a Grammy 10 times, three in a row from 2022 to 2024.

He says, „If something drives me crazy, I have to go somewhere else, and I don’t want that thing to be yoga.“ He’s struggled a lot with depression, anxiety and OCD, so maybe he just needs a distraction, I would understand that.

But unfortunately for all these women, he’s making sounds to me that aren’t very different from each other, I have trouble telling them apart. That doesn’t happen to me with Miley Cyrus and Beyonce, by the way, because Jack doesn’t produce them.

ZEIT wrote in 2017:
„If Antonoff were a painter, one could say: he works with a lot of colors and thick brushes, and when he’s done, he throws the leftovers in the pots over the canvas as a precaution. The songs he co-wrote seem overloaded with layers of synths, blobs of piano and drums, digital and real choirs, and a suffocating factory echo – as if they wanted to squeeze the entire sonic spectrum of the eighties into small, compact symphonies. „Stealing the first verse of a song from Elton John? Before anyone can get upset about that, the second verse takes an even sharper look at what Phil Collins has to offer.

Jack Antonoff.

Maybe it’s not the female musicians who need him. Maybe it’s that he needs them. Maybe he’s also a case of mediocrity who’s good with different people.

Or maybe he just doesn’t have his own deodorant roll.

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