“Mediocrity seems to somehow promote longevity of systems, projects, activities, and organizations. If you want to live longer, lower your standards. If you want a thing to last longer, lower your standards. Of course the “lowering” has to be done in a thoughtful way. Mediocritization isn’t cognitively free. It takes effort and imagination. The effort just goes in the opposite direction of optimization, a “creative inertia””