At some point in your journey as a creator, you’ve probably had the experience of watching a competitor with objectively lesser talent, quality, and utility gain more traction and garner more attention than your higher quality offering.

It’s easy to throw your hands up in defeat, complain of a rigged system, bemoan the fact that good marketers can get away with delivering lesser value products or blame it all on luck, either your competitor’s good or your own bad.

These are all fair and understandable reactions to the circumstances. There may be a rigged system, your competition may be better marketers than you, and it’s highly likely that they have been the beneficiaries of a stroke or two of luck along the way*.

* You almost certainly have as well, but we’ll talk about that another time

As much as we would like to believe that our society is a strict meritocracy, where the cream rises to the top, and hard work and initiative are rewarded with commensurate success, it’s not, and they’re not.

The system does not always work fairly, reward the most deserving, and occasionally even elevates the truly deplorable to the highest levels of a field.

Faced with this reality, there’s another reaction common to creators, one that almost ensures they will never get the big break they seek.

“If mediocre work is capable of not only outperforming objectively better offers, but gaining broad, mainstream success,” they think, “there’s no point in putting in the time, energy and emotional labour of creating something truly remarkable.”

This mindset chooses to focus solely on the outlier, ignoring the likely more numerous examples of creators and products that did put in more work and are of higher quality.

In all likelihood, there is a reason this mediocre-quality outlier slipped through the cracks and hit it big. Maybe they’re fantastic marketers, maybe they got lucky, or maybe they’ve built such a strong and generous relationship with their audience that the ultimate quality of their work is less important than the relationship itself.

This last point is at the root of effective marketing and should not be ignored by any creator or business.

Even if there’s no reason at all for your competition’s success and it’s entirely a fluke, choosing to settle for creating work that’s less than the work you’re truly capable of creating — just because someone else got away with it — is a poor assessment of the odds.

Remember, if they snuck through on mediocre work, they’re the outlier. The odds of you also sneaking through in the same niche is incredibly low, and is not a strategy you can bank on.

Sure, there’s no guarantee that creating the best work in the world will bring you recognition and success, you still need to do the hard work of marketing it effectively, building an authentic relationship with your audience, and catch some luck as well.

But creating work that matters, work that resonates, that maybe even changes the people who engage with it is a much more reliable path to success than hoping that out of all the mediocre work in the world, yours will be the one that gets picked.

Besides, is creating mediocre work really the best way to serve your audience?

There’s enough mediocrity in the world already. Create something that elevates your niche and raises the bar for everything that comes after it.

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