The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

In this book, you will learn that just as there is no such thing as average body size, there is no such thing as average talent, average intelligence, or average character. Nor are there average students or average employees—or average brains, for that matter. Every one of these familiar notions is a figment of a misguided scientific imagination. Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago by two European scientists to solve the social problems of their era. Their notion of the “Average Man” did indeed solve many of their challenges and even facilitated and shaped the Industrial Age—but we no longer live in the Industrial Age. Today we face very different problems—and we possess science and math far better than what was available in the nineteenth century.