I remember the exact Tuesday I hit the wall. It wasn’t a dramatic crash. I didn’t collapse in a heap or quit my job in a blaze of glory. I just sat in my car in the grocery store parking lot, staring at a bag of kale, and realized I couldn’t move.

My phone was full of apps designed to make me better. I had a meditation streak to keep. I had a hydration goal to hit. I had a podcast queued up about “maximizing deep work” because I couldn’t justify driving in silence. I had optimized every single inch of my life to be productive, healthy, and efficient.

And I was empty.

We live in an era that treats “average” like a disease. We are told that if we aren’t crushing our morning routine, side-hustling our evenings, and drinking the perfect amount of alkaline water, we are failing. We have turned our lives into a performance sport where the finish line keeps moving.

But here is the brutal truth the hustle gurus won’t tell you.

You cannot optimize everything without destroying the machine.

The Cost of “Peak Performance”

There is an economic concept called the Law of Diminishing Returns. It states that after a certain point, adding more effort will not produce more results; it will actually make fewer.

Think of it like a car engine. You can redline a car for a few minutes to pass a truck on the highway. But if you drive with your foot mashed to the floor for six hours, you don’t get there faster. You blow a gasket.

Human beings are biological engines. When we try to be “A-plus” students in every category—parenting, fitness, career, hobbies, home organization—we create a state of chronic cognitive load.

Psychologists call this Decision Fatigue. Every time you force yourself to make the “optimal” choice—to cook the perfect meal instead of ordering pizza, to wake up an hour early to run—you drain a finite tank of willpower. By 2:00 PM, your tank is dry. That is why you snap at your spouse or stare blankly at your email. You aren’t lazy. You are biologically bankrupt.

The Case for Selective Mediocrity

The solution is not to try harder. The solution is to embrace a concept I call Selective Mediocrity.

This sounds terrifying to high achievers. We define ourselves by our excellence. But Selective Mediocrity isn’t about giving up. It is about cold, hard math. You only have enough energy to be genuinely exceptional at two or three things at a time. To protect those things, you must aggressively choose to be “average” at everything else.

I made a list of the twenty things I was trying to optimize. I circled the two that actually moved the needle for my life: my writing and my family.

For everything else, I lowered the bar to the floor.

I stopped trying to cook gourmet healthy meals and started eating the same simple sandwich for lunch every day. I stopped trying to read fifty books a year and allowed myself to watch “trash” TV when I was tired. I stopped trying to be the perfect friend who texts back immediately and became the friend who replies in three days but truly listens.

The “B-Minus” Liberation

When you permit yourself to do “B-minus” work in the non-essential areas of your life, something magical happens. You get your brain back.

Suddenly, you aren’t agonizing over which laundry detergent is the most eco-friendly. You buy the one on sale. You aren’t stressing about whether your morning run was a “personal best.” You just ran. You stop monitoring yourself.

The energy you save doesn’t disappear. It funnels directly into the things you circled.

Since I embraced mediocrity in my housekeeping and my social media presence, my writing has never been sharper. My time with my kids is no longer distracted by the guilt of what I “should” be doing. I am not optimized anymore. I am messy. I am inconsistent. I am often inefficient.

But for the first time in years, I am actually awake.

Your Challenge Today

You don’t need another app. You don’t need a better planner. You need to look at your life and pick the things you are willing to be bad at.

Pick a category—your wardrobe, your yard, your emails—and decide right now that “good enough” is the goal. Release the pressure. Let the streak die. Eat the frozen pizza.

Save your brilliance for the work that only you can do. The world doesn’t need you to be perfect. It requires you to be human, and you can’t be human if you are running on empty.