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The Bowl of Mediocrity

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Cottrell addresses the common feeling of being stuck or not progressing in one’s career. He introduces a conceptual framework called the ‘bowl of mediocrity’ to diagnose this stagnation. The model visualizes a graph where the y-axis represents effectiveness/importance and the x-axis represents risk level (from high experience/low risk on the left to low experience/high risk on the right).

Cottrell explains that early in a career, individuals learn fundamentals on the left side of the graph, experiencing rapid growth. However, a critical error occurs when people move away from these basics but do not venture far enough into the high-risk, high-learning zone on the right. Instead, they settle in a middle ‘no-man’s-land’—the bowl of mediocrity—where work is challenging enough to avoid boredom but not valuable or failure-prone enough to foster significant learning or career advancement.

The solution proposed is a dual focus: first, to deeply reinvest in mastering fundamentals until they become intuitive, and second, to deliberately seek out high-risk projects where failure is likely. Cottrell emphasizes that failure is highly correlated with learning. By building a strong intuitive base, one gains the support needed to attempt daring, failure-prone tasks that accelerate growth.

He advises listeners to personalize this model, as what is fundamental or risky varies by individual and context. Engaging with managers or mentors to identify appropriate fundamentals and high-risk opportunities is recommended to avoid misjudging value or risk. The goal is to fluidly expand one’s expertise, transforming the middle ground into intuitive knowledge and continually pushing the learning curve upward by embracing failure as a teacher.

Recommendations

Communities

  • Developer Tea Discord — Listeners are encouraged to join this community to discuss ideas and reflect with other engineers for deeper engagement beyond the episode.

Podcasts

  • Command Line Heroes — Season 7 is highlighted, which explores the history of the internet’s development in 1995, including stories like Elizabeth ‘Jake’ Feinler’s role in managing early domain registrations.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to feeling stuck in career progression — Jonathan Cottrell opens the episode by asking listeners if they feel stuck, not on a specific problem, but in their overall career or relationship progression. He encourages specificity in identifying what aspect feels stalled, such as pay, technical connection with peers, or other areas. The episode’s goal is to explore one reason for this feeling through a mental model called the ‘bowl of mediocrity’.
  • 00:02:24 — Sponsor segment for Command Line Heroes podcast — The episode is sponsored by Command Line Heroes. Cottrell promotes Season 7, which explores the history of the internet’s development in 1995. He highlights stories like Elizabeth ‘Jake’ Feinler, who managed domain registrations before companies like GoDaddy existed. The sponsor segment concludes, and the main discussion resumes.
  • 00:04:08 — Explaining the Bowl of Mediocrity graph and concept — Cottrell introduces the ‘bowl of mediocrity’ as a 2D graph. The y-axis represents effectiveness/importance, and the x-axis represents risk level (from high experience/low risk on the left to low experience/high risk on the right). He describes how careers typically start on the left with learning fundamentals, then progress to more advanced techniques. The ‘bowl’ forms when individuals move away from basics but avoid the high-risk right side, settling in a middle zone of mediocre, low-learning work.
  • 00:07:25 — The critical error and consequences of the middle ground — Cottrell details the critical error: leaving fundamentals but not embracing high-risk failure. This middle ‘bowl of mediocrity’ results in work that isn’t highly valuable and doesn’t leverage intuition. He connects this to the feeling of slowing down, as learning plateaus when failure is avoided. The discussion emphasizes that failure is correlated with learning, and losing touch with fundamentals undermines the foundation needed for growth.
  • 00:09:11 — The two-part challenge: fundamentals and high-risk failure — Cottrell challenges listeners to focus on two areas: deeply mastering fundamentals until they become intuitive, and actively pursuing high-risk, failure-prone projects. He notes that what is fundamental or risky is personal and context-dependent. The goal is to use a strong intuitive base to support daring attempts, avoiding the unproductive middle ground where little learning occurs.
  • 00:12:07 — Practical advice: involving others and fluid growth — Cottrell advises not to pursue this refocus in isolation. He recommends discussing goals with managers or mentors to validate ideas about fundamentals and high-risk opportunities. The graph is fluid; as fundamentals strengthen and risks are taken, the ‘bowl’ shrinks, and middle tasks become intuitive. Embracing failure accelerates the learning curve, helping escape mediocrity.
  • 00:13:33 — Closing remarks and community promotion — Cottrell thanks the sponsor, Command Line Heroes, again and encourages listeners to share the podcast to help it reach new developers. He invites those wanting deeper discussion to join the Developer Tea Discord community. The episode concludes with a reminder of the show’s mission to provide clarity, perspective, and purpose in developers’ careers.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2021-07-12T07:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:14:58

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Have you ever felt stuck?

[00:00:06] I don’t mean stuck on a problem, like you can’t solve it, I mean stuck as if you’re

[00:00:13] not progressing.

[00:00:15] Things have slowed down, it’s not like things are going poorly necessarily, but you don’t

[00:00:21] seem to be progressing very quickly in your career or your relationships.

[00:00:29] We’re going to talk about one reason why that might be in today’s episode.

[00:00:33] My name is Jonathan Cottrell, you’re listening to Developer Tea.

[00:00:36] My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose

[00:00:41] in their careers.

[00:00:45] Much of the time when we feel stuck, we have some level of influence both over this feeling

[00:00:54] and over our situation.

[00:00:57] We can recognize the feeling as just one of the experiences of life.

[00:01:04] It’s easy to dismiss this if that’s your goal, but I suspect that if you are feeling this,

[00:01:12] it’s because you’ve observed something about your career that’s unsettling.

[00:01:18] Something isn’t moving the way that you thought it would.

[00:01:22] I want you to be very specific if you’re going to engage with this episode.

[00:01:29] I want you to be very specific, very explicit about what that thing is.

[00:01:35] What is it that you thought would move along differently than it’s currently moving along?

[00:01:42] For example, is it your pay?

[00:01:44] Or maybe it’s the feeling that you have when you’re around other engineers, maybe you don’t

[00:01:49] feel like you can connect with them on a technical level.

[00:01:55] Or maybe it has nothing to do with these things at all.

[00:01:58] Whatever it is, be very explicitly clear about what you feel stalled out on.

[00:02:05] In today’s episode, I want to introduce an idea, kind of a mental model that I’m going

[00:02:10] to call the bowl of mediocrity.

[00:02:14] We’re going to talk about the bowl of mediocrity right after we talk about today’s sponsor.

[00:02:24] Today’s episode is sponsored by Command Line Heroes.

[00:02:28] Season 7 of Command Line Heroes is available now.

[00:02:32] I can tell you right now, if you’re somewhere around my age, you’re going to find it very

[00:02:39] but also an incredible dive into the history of what got us where we are today.

[00:02:46] Many of us as software engineers, we depend on the things that are talked about in this

[00:02:52] season.

[00:02:53] We go back to a pivotal year, 1995, the start of the dot com boom, but it didn’t just happen

[00:03:01] automatically.

[00:03:02] A lot of things had to come together for the internet to succeed.

[00:03:06] For example, back then GoDaddy didn’t exist.

[00:03:09] What did you do to find a domain?

[00:03:13] As it turns out, there was a woman that you’d have to call.

[00:03:15] Her name was Elizabeth Jake Feinler.

[00:03:18] She was the keeper of all domains.

[00:03:21] This and many other kind of wild pieces of lore about how the internet came to be can

[00:03:27] be found on season 7 of Command Line Heroes.

[00:03:32] Command Line Heroes is hosted by developer and podcasters, Ronyat Barak.

[00:03:37] Go and check it out wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:03:41] I’ve had a chance to get into this podcast and it does feel like I’m listening almost

[00:03:47] to a choose your own adventure kind of documentary mashup with real life.

[00:03:53] It’s really cool.

[00:03:54] You can find Command Line Heroes wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:03:59] My thanks to Command Line Heroes for their support of developer tea.

[00:04:08] So we’re talking today about the bowl of mediocrity.

[00:04:11] You might find yourself in this bowl.

[00:04:14] And when we’re talking about this, I want you to visualize that shape of a bowl and

[00:04:19] think about it from kind of a 2D perspective.

[00:04:21] We were cut the bowl in half and you’re looking at it from the side, the kind of shape of

[00:04:27] the curve that goes down and back up.

[00:04:31] And I want you to think about this as a curve on a graph.

[00:04:36] And on this graph, on the y-axis is effective or important.

[00:04:45] These are the higher you go on this y-axis, the better off you likely are.

[00:04:52] And then on the left to right axis, you’re looking at risk level.

[00:04:58] Risk level roughly equating in this case to difficulty or experience.

[00:05:03] Things that you have experience with.

[00:05:05] The things further to the left on the x-axis, you have more experience with.

[00:05:11] Things further to the right, you are more kind of relatively inexperienced with.

[00:05:17] And you can kind of draw this out for yourself if you need a visual kind of the bowl of mediocrity.

[00:05:23] You can put it in your notebook to remind you of these things.

[00:05:28] And here’s the basic idea.

[00:05:30] As people progress through their careers, most of the time, we start out on the far

[00:05:36] left of this bowl.

[00:05:40] We don’t really know a lot, but we start learning the things that are considered kind of the

[00:05:45] fundamentals, the basics.

[00:05:48] The basics of being a software engineer, the basics of working on a team, the kind of basics

[00:05:53] of the company that we’re working for, whatever the business structure is, those are considered

[00:06:01] kind of the basic building blocks of a career and of a specific position.

[00:06:07] You probably have a list of these things.

[00:06:09] You could write it down pretty quickly, both that are relative to your career in general,

[00:06:14] but also to your specific business that you work in.

[00:06:19] And then all the way on the right side of this, we have things that are highly prone

[00:06:25] to failure, things that if you were to try them, you’re as likely or perhaps even more

[00:06:32] likely to fail than you are to succeed.

[00:06:35] Now this graph kind of starts out with that space, you know, the full distance of that

[00:06:42] x-axis is very small.

[00:06:44] As beginners, we’re likely to fail at some of the most basic things.

[00:06:49] So we learn a lot in those early days because as we learn those basic things and we fail

[00:06:58] with those basic things, that x-axis begins to grow.

[00:07:05] And so now we become more solid, kind of more solidified in the basic things.

[00:07:12] We begin to traverse that x-axis from the left to the right.

[00:07:18] We start to learn more advanced techniques.

[00:07:22] Now here’s where we make a critical error.

[00:07:25] As we learn more advanced techniques, we begin to walk away from the basics, but we don’t

[00:07:33] go all the way to the right side of that x-axis.

[00:07:39] In other words, we’re staying in some safe space.

[00:07:44] We’re trying to avoid failure by staying in the middle.

[00:07:51] This is the bowl of mediocrity.

[00:07:54] We’ve walked away from focusing and investing in the basics and the fundamentals, but we’re

[00:08:00] not walking all the way over and attempting things that we’re likely to fail at.

[00:08:09] As we are very often saying on this podcast, failure is highly correlated with learning.

[00:08:18] You don’t always learn when you fail.

[00:08:20] There are some failures that seem to be random.

[00:08:23] Sometimes we don’t get a lot out of them, but a lot of our learning does come along

[00:08:28] with failure.

[00:08:29] Those things tend to coincide.

[00:08:32] Interestingly, as we begin to progress in our careers and we walk away from the fundamentals,

[00:08:39] we also tend to lose touch.

[00:08:42] We don’t build intuition for those fundamentals.

[00:08:46] We lose touch with them.

[00:08:48] We end up working on things that live in that no-man’s-land middle ground.

[00:08:55] They’re not highly valuable.

[00:08:57] They’re challenging enough that we’re not necessarily bored, but we’re not becoming

[00:09:02] very good at much.

[00:09:05] My challenge to you is to focus on two areas.

[00:09:11] The fundamentals, really getting those down to the point that you have them intuitively.

[00:09:19] You’re building an intuition.

[00:09:20] You’re focusing on those fundamentals and spending time in that highly risky failure

[00:09:28] zone, taking on projects that you don’t necessarily even feel comfortable with the scope of, trying

[00:09:38] to learn something that requires so much more of you than you expected yourself to have.

[00:09:46] There’s no specific prescription of what kinds of things fit on either end of this.

[00:09:53] Sometimes what is fundamental in one business might be a very risky thing in another business.

[00:10:01] There’s no specific formula for figuring out what lands where on this continuum.

[00:10:10] This is, as we mentioned earlier, very highly personalized.

[00:10:14] Things that you may have an intuition for, someone else may have zero experience with,

[00:10:21] and so it may be very far to the right on their graph, whereas it’s very far to the

[00:10:25] left on yours.

[00:10:28] It’s important to recognize that this is a very personal experience thing, but the bowl

[00:10:32] of mediocrity is intended to get you thinking about the fact that these fundamentals and

[00:10:39] building a high degree of experience and expertise with the fundamentals, almost to the point

[00:10:46] that they become automatic for you.

[00:10:48] They’re so intuitive.

[00:10:50] That is the basis.

[00:10:52] That is the structure and the support that you need to do the more daring, failure-prone

[00:11:01] things.

[00:11:03] You build off of that intuitive structure.

[00:11:07] If you’re sitting somewhere in the middle in the bowl of mediocrity, if you’re trying

[00:11:14] to do something that’s in the middle, you likely are not relying on your intuition.

[00:11:19] That’s very important to focus on.

[00:11:23] You’re not relying on much of your built-in intuition, your experience.

[00:11:27] Instead, you’re plugging along without really learning much at all.

[00:11:33] This is where that feeling of slowing down comes from.

[00:11:39] If I had to sum this up, the first step here is refocus yourself on the fundamentals.

[00:11:48] Look for opportunities in that space.

[00:11:52] Look for opportunities that look like high-risk, high-reward scenarios.

[00:11:58] And again, this is at a personal level, high-risk, high-reward for you.

[00:12:03] Now, as kind of a bonus tip, don’t do this in the dark.

[00:12:07] Talk to other people in your organization, especially talk to your manager or a mentor,

[00:12:12] somebody who you can bounce these ideas off of.

[00:12:15] Let them know that you want to focus, you want to kind of build up your expertise as

[00:12:21] a fundamental engineer, but also you want to take a shot at something that is higher

[00:12:28] on that kind of risk profile for you.

[00:12:31] And see what they say.

[00:12:32] It’s very possible that you are overestimating the risk.

[00:12:36] It’s also possible that you’re overestimating the value of that thing.

[00:12:39] You might need to choose a different thing, but focus on the fundamentals and then bounce

[00:12:45] your ideas off.

[00:12:46] Look for opportunities to take deep shots.

[00:12:49] Don’t work in that middle space.

[00:12:52] Try to avoid working in that middle space.

[00:12:54] Eventually, the things that are fundamentals, you’ll begin to kind of expand that.

[00:12:59] The bowl kind of begins to meet in the middle and some of the things that are currently

[00:13:04] in the middle, those will become intuitive to you as well.

[00:13:08] This is a very fluid graph and your goal should be to build up a very strong base so that

[00:13:14] you can take those riskier shots and become comfortable with taking risk towards failure

[00:13:23] so that you can learn more.

[00:13:24] Your learning curve is going to go through the roof if you’re failing more often.

[00:13:29] Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Developer T. A huge thank you again back

[00:13:33] to Command Line Heroes.

[00:13:36] Season seven of Command Line Heroes takes you back to the pivotal year of 1995.

[00:13:42] You can find that podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts like where you’re listening to

[00:13:47] this one right now.

[00:13:49] Over the course of the past year, the pandemic and very likely the fewer people actually

[00:13:55] going on their daily commute, this has had an impact on all podcasts.

[00:14:02] So we’re trying to, you know, every podcast you listen to is likely trying to find their

[00:14:06] way and reach listeners who are listening in new ways.

[00:14:11] I’d love to hear from you about how you listen to this podcast and also if you know somebody

[00:14:17] who’s searching for a podcast, please take a moment to send this podcast to them.

[00:14:23] This is the best way you can help this show reach new engineers like you who are looking

[00:14:29] for clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers.

[00:14:32] If you enjoyed this discussion but you want to go deeper, you want to reflect your ideas

[00:14:37] off of other engineers, encourage you to join the Developer Tea Discord community.

[00:14:42] Head over to developertea.com slash Discord.

[00:14:46] Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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