You're right, outlasting everyone is a way to suck less. But it's not a real way to be the best. Being the best and sucking less have similar starting steps but very different ending steps. Where you stop on your list and write "repeat" is where the journey to being the best just begins.

I don't know about you, but I never want to just be mediocre. I want to be really damn good at whatever it is I try. Even knowing that one of the greats could "come out of retirement" and still out-do me is not good enough for me. That's just patience resulting in complacency and mediocrity.

I think we agree, but are just missing on semantics. What I mean is that once you get to a level of mediocrity, there's a whole new level of things for you to try out and suck at. Most of these you're not able to try at from the start or you're not ready to try at the start, but as you grow and become mediocre, you can start to reach a little higher.

If you repeat this enough times, you'll outlast enough people to the point where you're pretty damn good at something.

Yeah, I agree with that :)

See http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/graphics.html

"The road to wisdom? Well its plain and simple to express - err and err and err again. But less and less and less" (Piet Hein)