Mediocrity at scale.
There's a brand new way to fail, and it's spreading fast.
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This essay was originally published here.
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A 22-year-old with a brand new business degree applied to more than 1,700 jobs in ten months, and he only ended up with one offer. Selling mobile phones at Costco.
How do I know this? Because Fortune wrote a big story about him, the same way that Business Insider and Forbes did around the exact same time. In fact, it’s the kind of story that gets rewritten every few months with a new face and a slightly different angle. The industry will change, or the number of applications the person sends out will get bigger. Seventeen hundred. Two thousand. Three million. It doesn’t actually matter because the takeaway always stays the same:
The job market is unfair, and the system is broken.
I call BS on all of it. Journalism like this drives me crazy.
Sure, someone who grinds out 1,700 applications is at least trying. That’s something. But nobody who writes these articles ever points out the very obvious flaw in the story. That volume isn’t an indicator of quality. In fact, it’s often the opposite. Because, in a world where AI can polish your resume, generate custom cover letters, and auto-apply to jobs while you sleep, volume is worthless. It’s the same exact effort every other candidate can produce. So it lands in a pile of identical slop and carries no value.
The guy being interviewed told Fortune that he couldn’t understand it. He had a degree, work experience, references, and a tailored resume. He called it a “mystery.” But every other person applying to those roles has degrees, experience, references, and more. Mystery solved!
Of course, the article doesn’t talk about any of that. Instead, it frames this as the market failing the candidate.
Angles like this create a blanket permission slip to fail in this way. Then, every person cranking out applications like this reads the story and thinks, “It’s not me. It’s the market!” So, they go back to the auto-apply button and keep pressing. And a few months later, one of them is the subject of the next article. Around and around we go.
It’s cliché, but this is the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But these folks aren’t insane. They’ve just become completely focused on the activity instead of the outcome.
It’s a flywheel. It spins on sympathy, and this kind of media coverage excuses the approach. The excuse produces more of the same approach, and the same approach produces the next story. Everyone inside the flywheel gets to feel unlucky instead of accountable or responsible.
So why am I even thinking about a two-year-old article about job hunting?
Because I recently came across a beautiful example of the opposite approach on Substack. Someone who, rather than pressing the easy button a thousand times, sat down and engineered one attempt, aimed at exactly one person. And she crushed it.
Anna Reich was struggling inside the same “impossible” job market back in April. She’s a management consultant who lost her job two years ago, and she could have used the same excuses as everyone else. Hell, if she’d fired off two thousand applications and gotten nothing back, Fortune might have written about her too.
But instead, Anna got laser-focused on one job she wanted. The funny part? The job didn’t even exist yet. But with the mission clear in her mind, Anna published a public letter on Substack called “How I’d Help Jay Clouse Prepare His Business for Paternity Leave in 6 Months.”
If you’re not familiar with Jay, he runs a business called Creator Science, and Anna had been following his business for two years as a member of his community. Her article was a genius response to a video Jay posted about getting his business prepared for his paternity leave. In that video, Jay talked about delegating, and Anna saw an opportunity.
She researched everything she could about Jay’s business. She dove into Jay’s latest business retro, listened to hours of his podcast, interviewed members of his community who had churned, and quoted his own posts back to him. Anna wanted to show him that there was a difference between what he planned to do during his leave and what he needed to do. Then she told him, in a section she literally titled “Why this isn’t enough,” that the plan he was describing didn’t match the goal he’d set for himself.
Twelve days later, Jay commented on her article: “Plot Twist: I hired Anna.”
How does something like this happen? A curious, creative person like Anna takes the opposite approach from everyone else in the same situation. She put in the kind of work no automation could produce, and created a valuable and detailed essay, with her name attached for the entire Substack ecosystem to see. High value, zero scale. The inverse of the easy button. Then she let the internet go do its thing.
This is how you set yourself apart from the pack. And this is the kind of story Fortune should be writing about.
Of course I understand how easy it is to lean into the opposite. To join the voices saying everything is impossible and unfair. To sit at the table with excuse makers. I’ve done it myself when an essay bombs, my reach tanks, my revenue drops, or whatever else is bound to happen in entrepreneurship. Because making excuses can feel comfortable and communal, and sometimes even get you media coverage!
The excuse is free, and everyone qualifies for it.
The work that gets noticed is hard and expensive, and almost nobody is willing to make the effort. You spend your valuable time and attention, and you risk being judged on what you actually think when you put it out there for the world (and your intended target) to see. Very few people are willing to pay that price, which is exactly why it’s the best deal available.
To be clear, this essay isn’t a commentary on job hunting. What I’m interested in is human agency. Because AI has handed every one of us the same easy button. Whatever it is you do, now you can do a version of it a thousand times without thinking. And the result is that the average person has become more efficient at being extremely mediocre.
Mediocrity at scale.
If life isn’t giving you what you want, maybe it’s time to ask yourself a simple question. What specific thing could I do this week that would be so good, it would be impossible to ignore?
Anna did something Jay couldn’t ignore.
What could you do?
Because the flywheel already has a sympathetic story waiting for you. It will blame the market or some business or person or something else. And you can feel cozy about being one of a million other stories like that.
Anna was supposed to be one of those stories. She got hired instead.
That’s all for this week.
See you next Saturday.
Cheers,
Justin Welsh
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Thanks for covering my story, Justin :)
I just wrote a similar article about AI generated content. If you just want a bunch of quantity out there and all of it to be mediocre then go for it. But it's not going to be engaging and it's not going to convert readers into customers.