Charity Majors
cofounder and CTO of honeycomb.io; pioneered modern observability. co-author of O'Reilly books "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering...
“Intelligence is overweighted on. It has been dramatically overweighted on for the past few decades at least, if not longer. There are so many things about being a person are not about how smart you are. And the more obsessed we get with our intelligence and with being the best, the more we really lose out on the journey and the joy of the … there's so much more to life than smarts.”
The Stack Overflow Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
Charity Majors and Ryan Donovan are discussing a book and what AI means for how people value themselves. She says most of us are average at things, and Ryan jokes "Embrace your mediocrity." She then argues that society puts too much weight on intelligence.
Transcript
But most of us are not the best and the smartest. Most people are, we're all average in some way. And I feel like...
Embrace your mediocrity.
It's intelligence is overweighted on. It has been dramatically overweighted on for the past few decades at least, if not longer. There are so many things about being a person are not about how smart you are. And the more obsessed we get with our intelligence and with being the best, the more we really lose out on the journey and the joy of the, like there's so much more to life than smarts.
Yeah. We all have become knowledge workers, right? Our power in the labor market is our knowledge.
And with AI, I mean, computers, one of the other things I liked about this book was that it showed how much it scared people, the advent of quantum physics. Yeah, when we ceased to
understand the world. Yeah.
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