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

by Todd Rose

Rather than suggesting that people should strive harder to conform to an artificial ideal of normality, Daniels’s analysis led him to a counterintuitive conclusion that serves as the cornerstone of this book: Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail.

What if I were to tell you that this form of measurement—the average—was almost always wrong? That when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results? What if, like the cockpit designs and Norma statues, this ideal is just a myth? The central premise of this book is deceptively simple: no one is average.

It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you’re comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots—as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups—then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a doctor, the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee—the moment you need to make a decision about any individual—the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.

Human potential is nowhere near as limited as the systems we have put in place assume. We just need the tools to understand each person as an individual, not as a data point on a bell curve.

The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.

Quetelet’s invention of the Average Man marked the beginning of the Age of Average. It represented the moment when the average became normal, the individual became error, and stereotypes were validated with the imprint of science.

Contemporary pundits, politicians, and activists continually suggest that our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.

How can a society predicated on the conviction that individuals can only be evaluated in reference to the average ever create the conditions for understanding and harnessing individuality?

In essence, both Quetelet and Lord and Novick assumed that measuring one person many times was interchangeable with measuring many people one time.

Molenaar recognized that the fatal flaw of averagarianism was its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality. He gave a name to this error: “the ergodic switch.”

A quality is jagged if it meets two criteria. First, it must consist of multiple dimensions. Second, these dimensions must be weakly related to one another.

We tend to believe that, deep down in the bedrock of a person’s soul, someone is essentially wired to be friendly or unfriendly, lazy or industrious, introverted or extroverted, and that these defining characteristics will shine through no matter what the circumstances or task. This belief is known as essentialist thinking.

But what about honesty? Loyalty? Kindness? Aren’t these inherent to our character? Or is character, too, a changeable, contextual quality? For a long time, it was believed that people’s character is burned into their nature. If we learn that our neighbor’s son was caught shoplifting candy at the local convenience store, we instinctively presume he is going to steal other things, too. We certainly would not leave him alone in our home. We might even be inclined to believe that he has some defect of moral fiber that will inevitably drive him to not only commit further acts of thievery, but will most likely lead him to behave in other unscrupulous ways, such as cheating at school and lying to adults. This view, as it turns out, is wrong. Character is no different than any human behavior: it is meaningless to talk about it in the absence of context.

The fact that there is not a single, normal pathway for any type of human development—biological, mental, moral, or professional—forms the basis of the third principle of individuality, the pathways principle. This principle makes two important affirmations. First, in all aspects of our lives and for any given goal, there are many, equally valid ways to reach the same outcome; and, second, the particular pathway that is optimal for you depends on your own individuality.

If you believe only one pathway exists to achieve your goal, then all there is to evaluate your progress with is how much faster or slower you hit each milestone compared to the norm. Consequently, we bestow tremendous meaning on the pace of personal growth, learning, and development, equating faster with better.