mediocrity
(part of an article by Douglas Soccio in the record searchlight)

Moral mediocrities...are the folks who are always ready for a break, who work a bit slower than the other members of the crew, who wimp out early, who use up their sick days when they aren't really sick, who get other people to do their drudge work.
ironically, moral mediocrities are more of a threat to our long-term well-being than terrorists, serial killers, and criminals. seriously bad characters are more manageable threats than moral mediocrities- leeches, praise-stealers, slackers, layabouts, and self-pamperers - beacuse big-time thugs tend to be easily recognized and the harm they cause clearly demarcated. dealing with them, we know who the enemy is and where the battle must be joined; and so we have comrades in our resistence to them.
but how do we defend oursleves against our own lack of diligence, our own resistance to sustained, first-rate work, our own inattentiveness, last-minute-itis, and good-enough-is-good-enough mediocrity? how do the lazy and sloppy put up a sustained effort for and against much of anything, except, perhaps, against sustained, hard, fist rate work?

changedfish-diligence is where it's at!