It's called traversing a valley of the fitness landscape. The comfortable strategy is to just stay where you are, with everyone else mediocre, at the current local population maxima. The uncomfortable strategy is to dare execute on your visions; which often means passing through states of lower energy before reaching the great. You think you see a hill higher than the one you and everyone else is standing on right now, but you're not sure because it's far away. What posts like these rarely mention, however, is just how many ants die far out in the low-energy desert plains; we only hear about the successes.