My dear,

Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off.

The only way to get rid of it is to strip completely and publicly naked, and to wander the world until you find a shirts that’s perfectly clean. Clean in the sense that it’s absolutely free from any excuses of why to do things normally, or why anything is ‘good enough’. Clean in the sense that it’s a shirt that says that absolute cleanliness is of the heavens, that the earth is by nature dirty, and that it’s brave enough to aim for that cleanliness against all odds. The trouble being that most people are both scared to be naked in public, and afraid to be as brave as that clean shirt.

The trouble is that most people pick the shirt with the spot on it… People don’t want to wear a shirt they can’t live up to afterall.

Falsely yours,
Haruki Murakami