Under-achievement...the new normal

Publisher’s note:  I have been blessed to meet a number of really brilliant people via social media.  Sybele Capezzutti is one of those.  She is a hard working single mother who is at once very down to earth, intelligent, talented, and drop dead gorgeous.

In this very brief and to the point commentary, she lays out in no uncertain terms how we have become a society that applauds mediocrity and ignores the extraordinary.  

I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

Sybele Capezzutti:  As someone that tries to always be informed about what is going on in the World in and in our Country I find myself constantly wondering how some things got to the point they are now…

We currently have 46 million people collecting government assistance, lack of skilled labor, college graduates without any critical thinking skills, an astonishing lack of work ethics, we’re fighting a war using minimal effort to win, corruption and misconduct in government agencies go unpunished, bogus unemployment numbers, the lowest workforce participation rate since 1978, and the list goes on.

It was not until something happened in my personal work environment that I realized that every one of these problems were somehow related to one basic flaw in our society, amazingly this is a flaw that was created on purpose, calculated, planned, promoted and exercised, until it became the new normal.

So here we are we’ve successfully embraced a culture of underachievement!

We’ve started with our education system by eliminating competition, everyone deserves a medal just for participating and the “no child left behind” program incentivizes teachers to pass a student that has not performed as needed. Then we’ve lowered the standards for everything else, military enlistment, background checks to work for government agencies, what kind of immigrants to welcome into our society, and let’s not forget what in my humble opinion has done the most damage… the victimization of certain groups of people, therefore removing personal responsibility and giving them an unfair advantage over the ones who actually want to succeed by their own merit. Overall our government has created an overgenerous reinsurance policy for underachieving people. What I find baffling is how most people fail to see that achievement is directly related to dignity or lack thereof. 

As a woman, an immigrant and single mother, I’ve never felt the need to claim the victim status which would have been promptly handed to me if I wanted it, but I was not raised to be an underachiever, nor do I understand why anyone would embrace that mentality or even impose it on our future generations!

We have a serious problem in our Nation, one that needs to be dealt with before we become a third World Country, and trust me, that is exactly the direction we are going if we continue to have low expectations from our Citizens. Being raised in a third World Country myself I can tell you that the victim status and low expectation in terms of performance is exactly what generates a people that will vote their way into servitude in exchange for what they believe are free “offerings” from their handlers.

It’s time we start rewarding exceptional performance instead of punishing it, it’s time we stop seeing some people as victims and allow them to excel on their own merit, it’s time we stop incentivizing laziness and lack of ambition, it’s time we stop rewarding underachievement, it’s time we remember what built this Country and made it exceptional, it’s time we welcome success back into our society!