Ray Bennett - The Underachievers Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great

Despite everything you may have heard about striving for excellence, mediocrity is the key to happiness. Consider: There are more than six billion people on the planet. Almost none of them care about your latest victory in the stock market, or the promotion you earned. You finally bought that new car? Found a way to swing the payments on a bigger house? You lost six pounds last week? Wonderful. A disconcerting number of the six billion are just trying to get enough food to stay alive.

But also consider: They dont care if you fell flat on your face, either. They dont care if youre ugly, lazy, or out of shape. It doesnt matter to them if Suzy Perfect scored thirty points higher than you on the last math test, or if you were cut from the football team. You didnt meet your sales quota, lost your job, and feel humiliated? Take heart; the world wont hold it against you. Its a simple fact of life that your successes and failures really dont matter to nearly everybody alive. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can take comfort from it and get on with underachievement. Think globally; underachieve locally.

On the home front, too, achievement isnt all its cracked up to be. Your friends, colleagues, and neighborsand even your own familymay be less thrilled with your stellar accomplishments than you think. They may not show it, and no doubt some of them are even adept at sounding sincerely pleased about your success, but have no illusions. They have been taught that striving for excellence is the key to their happiness as well. If there are winners, there are also losers, so if youre winning, what does that mean theyre doing? Must you cast your friends and loved ones in such comparative shade? The truth is, if you had any notions of making people admire you by accomplishing great things in life, forget it. Youre doing more harm than good. Let us all join hands and do less together. Then maybe lets all take a nap.

Now you might protest: But Im not out to feel superior. I just want to make a ton of money. Or maybe, I really do want perfect abs and buns of steel. Theres nothing intrinsically wrong with those sentiments, except that your assessment of these goals is relative. Studies have shown that peoples sense of satisfaction in life is so closely tied to their standing in relation to those around them that even absolute gains dont make them happy. Want to feel great about your income? Move to the third world. You climbed Mount Rainier? Thats great .?.?. until you find out that your neighbor climbed Mount Everest. Got a raise? It feels great until you discover that your colleague got one, too. It actually feels like an insult if her raise is a little higher. Constant comparison with people who are smarter, more successful, and more beautiful than we are breeds frustration and jealousy. Striving is suffering.

So why do we do it?

From an early age, weve all been taught that achievement is our friend. There was a lot for us to learn growing up, and positive feedback was a great way to motivate us. Teachers rewarded us with gold stars and good grades when we did well. And when we didnt do well, negative feedback helped us along, too. Didnt turn in the homework assignment? No recess. This applied to a lot more than just schoolwork. Athletic, artistic, and social achievement were always rewarded in so many ways, and in the process, we learned how to become fit, educated, occasionally creative, and (hopefully) socially responsible individuals.

But then theres everybody else. You can be a hypercompetitive golfer who maintains the lowest handicap in your social network, but just because you shot a seventy-two on your home course doesnt mean youll be challenging Tiger Woods. You probably wont even earn a dime for the showing, and if you stop to think about it, all youve done is piss off your buddies who all wish