The Blessings and Joy of Being ‘Mediocre’

My mother was an ordinary person. She passed away more than 10 years ago at the age of 83. Throughout her life, she had no chance to be a group or organisation leader although she might have the capacity. However, she had never stopped contributing to the empowerment of people around her…mostly through generously sharing her amazing cooking skills.

Our family lived in the village in Central Java in early 1960s. Twice or more, I got up at dawn, around four o’clock. As I groggily walk in the dark to the kitchen, there she was…baking pukis, carabikang, apem, nagasari and other popular local cakes. These cakes would be sold at her small shop at the front-part of our home when it was opened around seven o’clock.

My father died when my mother was still 38 years old. With her four children, she had to move to the city in East Java. After a few months of grieving and settling down, she soon reclaimed her composure and perseverance. There were several hungry stomachs to feed. She baked durian and pineapple snacks. My older brothers brought the packed snacks to several shops which were willing to help selling them.

Years later, she started a small restaurant selling chicken and lamb satay and other food. Through all her struggle, we never had no food to eat throughout those lowest years in our lives. And through that, I even could complete my college study.

In her older years, a distance relative asked her to help at her growing restaurants and catering businesses in Jakarta. My mother’s main task was sharing her cooking skills to the many cooks there. Through her intensive tutoring, the cooks could significantly improve their skills.

One of them even grabbed an opportunity to work in a restaurant in the US and managed to get very good salary. He called my mother several times to express his gratitude for what she had thought him before.

Breakthoughs

Yes…my mother was just an ordinary person. ‘Mediocre’ in the eyes of much more successful people. And the fact is the vast majority of people in this world are those similar to my mother…and I.

The world admires and pays great respect to influential and amazing leaders, inventors, geniuses, super-rich businessmen and other ‘super human’ people who have the capacity to bring about breakthroughs or impacts in this world.

But, these kinds of people are probably less than five or ten percent of the adult-age world population. The much larger group are ordinary people: teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, shop owners, farmers, factory workers, fishermen, delivery men, garbage collectors and processors, bus or truck drivers, plastics recyclers, and those with many other professions.

The world will not work even when all the leaders and breakthrough makers manage to do their best with their jobs. Their extra-ordinary visions and genius ideas will be useless when there are no ordinary people like us to help implement, produce and change them into reality.

The combined skills and energy of billions of ‘mediocre’ people like us have — through the centuries — contributed to the advancement and the greater welfare of the world.

We should always be grateful that we – the ordinary people that rarely being known by those outside our community – have had such a substantial role and contribution to the billions of lives around us.

Future demands

As we cast our sight to the future with all the hub-bub of the fast-changing challenges and opportunities, we have no option than continue upgrading and advancing our skills in whatever we could do best. And even that improvement might not be adequate to meet the rapid changes in so many fields from technology breakthroughs.

It is high time for us – the ‘mediocre’ majority — to review our skills and professions whether we need to further advance and enrich our skills in whatever we are doing or whether we need to start acquiring and mastering very different skills to meet completely different future demands.

Many professions have indeed vanished just like that during the last few years due to technology interventions. Hundreds of thousands of people collected parking payment or toll fees have lost their jobs because people now only need to tap their e-money cards to pay.

Many workers in newspaper and magazine production have also been laid off due to nosediving sales of printed products as more and more subscribers have shifted to real-time online reports.

So…the blessings and the power of the mediocre like us – if we are alright to be called mediocre – would indeed never obsolete in the future…and even could become much more influential. All the leaders, visionary inventors and breakthrough makers will continue to need people like us to make their dreams a reality.

The real challenge is how we keep updating and advance our skills to meet the future needs. We might have to make immediate and decisive actions to improve or completely transform our skills to be able to survive and improve our welfare. Who knows that through the skill advancement some of you might even manage to create some breakthroughs that would catapult you into the cream of the creams of the society.

If my mother is still alive and well, her cooking skills might still be up-to-date to meet customers’ expectation for savoury meals. The taste buds in our mouths have apparently undergone almost no changes amid all the massive revolutions in many aspects in the last decades.

But…there she is now embracing her joy in the immortal world up there. Thanks Mom, for being an excellent mediocre in the past who has brought about great joy to our taste buds… and love and kindness in our lives. (HS)