Whatever my talents are in the areas that I am most talented and skilled at, these areas can possibly only cover a rather small part of all human activities and talents. It follows that I, and everybody else, must be mediocre at most things. You might, for example, consider Ernest Hemingway to be among the greatest writers of all time; that doesn't exclude the high probability that he was mediocre at car repair or doing his taxes, but I simply don't know. My personal experience of my work life was that my job, for which I was hired due to having certain certified skills, involved a wide range of different skill requirements, some of which I wasn't as good at. The more different requirements you add to a job description, the higher the likelihood that you can't find a candidate that is exceptionally good at each of them.

The awareness of your own mediocrity can sometimes be very helpful. For example when deciding what career you want to pursue: There are some careers in which only the exceptionally good make money, e.g. rock stars, athletes, painters, and influencers, while people who choose that career with only mediocre skill end up not making even enough for a living. Other professions, like plumber, accountant, or engineer, do not really require people to be exceptional, and a person with a mediocre talent in that field will do perfectly fine.

I do have a few talents regarding gaming. But again, gaming has a lot of different forms, and spans a wide range of different required talents. It is only normal that I am at best mediocre at some of those talents, and thus at the games which require those talents. Which is why I am much in favor of games having variable skill requirements. Games where you need to be "this good" to even play the basics automatically exclude the part of the audience that is average or worse at that particular skill. Any game that requires any skill is usually most enjoyable when the skill requirement is a bit challenging, but not frustrating, and you can't achieve that with a single fixed setting for everybody. The guy on the internet gloating about how good he is at game X is still extremely unlikely to be as good at games requiring a different skill set, and in other aspects of real life.

There is currently an ongoing discussion of how close we are to achieve artificial general intelligence. The discussion is somewhat misleading in the context of people fearing for their jobs. General AI will always be rather expensive compared to narrower AI. A company would replace you with AI if that is a) cheaper than you are, and b) less likely to result in some catastrophic failure. So a) is unlikely to be true for general AI, while the current generation of narrower generative AI is still failing on b), and recommends sticking cheese to pizza with glue, or produces pictures of humans with the wrong number of fingers. However, it is rather likely that large language model generative AI achieves a mediocre level of writing more or less consistently; after all, if you basically take all writing, disassemble it, and put it together again, what else can you get than a mediocre result? Thus AI will never write at the level of Hemingway, but might very well be able to write Video Game Release Dates: The Biggest Games of June 2024 and Beyond (link more or less randomly chosen, no insult meant to the human author) without anybody noticing it wasn't written by a human. While writing legal briefs is probably still better to be left with humans. In the example mentioned above, I was unsure whether Ernest Hemingway was any good at car repair or doing taxes; I am pretty certain that I wouldn't want ChatGPT to do either for me. Nothing suggests that the skills of an AI follow a normal distribution, and it is more likely that mediocre is the best you can get, while a bad result at a task it isn't optimized for is highly likely.