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

by Todd Rose

There was no such thing as an average hand size. “When I left Harvard, it was clear to me that if you wanted to design something for an individual human being, the average was completely useless,” Daniels told

But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number. Zero. Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions.

Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size—say, neck circumference, thigh circumference, and wrist circumference—less than 3.5 percent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible.

Winners of the contest would get $100, $50, and $25 war bonds, and ten additional lucky women would get $10 worth of war stamps. The contest? To submit body dimensions that most closely matched the typical woman, “Norma,” as represented by a statue on display at the Cleveland Health Museum.11 Norma

“The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder,” Daniels wrote in 1952. “It is virtually impossible to find an average airman not because of any unique traits in this group but because of the great variability of bodily dimensions which is characteristic of all men.”21 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.

Why was the military willing to make such a radical change so quickly? Because changing the system was not an intellectual exercise—it was a practical solution to an urgent problem.

Some people must be average, you might insist, as a simple statistical truism. This book will show you how even this seemingly self-evident assumption is deeply flawed and must be abandoned.

In the nineteenth century, the most respected health and medical experts all insisted that diseases were caused by “miasma,” a fancy term for bad air.27 Western society’s system of heath was based on this assumption: to prevent diseases, windows were kept open or closed, depending on whether there was more miasma inside or outside the room;

When I was eighteen, I dropped out of high school with a 0.9 GPA—that’s a D-minus average. Before I was old enough to drink, I had held ten different minimum-wage jobs while trying to support a wife and son. Another son arrived when I was twenty-one. At the lowest point in my life, I was on welfare and working as an in-home nursing assistant performing enemas for $6.45 an hour.

Other people before Miller had noticed that individual brains often failed to resemble the Average Brain, but since everyone else ignored this awkward fact, they usually ignored it, too—just as scientists and physicians long ignored the fact that no real woman looked like Norma.

Every discipline that studies human beings has long relied on the same core method of research: put a group of people into some experimental condition, determine their average response to the condition, then use this average to formulate a general conclusion about all people.

In the early 1840s, Quetelet analyzed a data set published in an Edinburgh medical journal that listed the chest circumference, in inches, of 5,738 Scottish soldiers. This was one of the most important if uncelebrated studies of human beings in the annals of science. Quetelet added together each of the measurements, then divided the sum by the total number of soldiers. The result came out to just over thirty-nine and three-quarters inches—the average chest circumference of a Scottish soldier. This number represented one of the very first times a scientist had calculated the average of any human feature.

Ever since Quetelet introduced the idea of the Average Man, scientists have delineated the characteristics of a seemingly endless number of types, such as “Type-A personalities,” “neurotic types,” “micro-managers,” and “leader types,” arguing that you could make useful predictions about any given individual member of a group simply by knowing the traits of the average member—the group’s type.

Every Union soldier was measured physically, medically, and morally, and then—in explicit obedience to Quetelet’s new science—averages were calculated and reported. This mammoth study formed the basis for the American military’s long-standing philosophy of standardized design.

While this would hardly be startling news for us, in the 1830s suicide seemed to be a highly irrational private decision that could not possibly conform to any deeper pattern. Instead, Quetelet showed that suicides occurred with reliable and consistent regularity—and not only that, he claimed that the stability of the occurrences indicated that everyone possesses an average propensity toward suicide. The Average Man, attested Quetelet, was suicidal to an average extent.

Karl Marx adopted Quetelet’s ideas to develop his economic theory of Communism, announcing that the Average Man proved the existence of historical determinism. The physicist James Maxwell was inspired by Quetelet’s mathematics to formulate the classical theory of gas mechanics.

Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, read Quetelet and proclaimed, “It can be stated without exaggeration that more psychology can be learned from statistical averages than from all philosophers, except Aristotle.”

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.

one man who was especially concerned was Francis Galton. He was sure he knew the precise cause of the United Kingdom’s abrupt downturn: the growing status of the lower classes.

Luminaries who were far above average—like Galton and Queen Victoria and Isaac Newton—were assuredly not monstrosities, but instead formed a distinct class that Galton dubbed “the Eminent.” Those who were far below average Galton termed “the Imbecile.”

47 It might seem that there is some fundamental difference between saying a person scored in the 90th percentile and saying that a person is an introverted type, but both ultimately require a comparison to an average score. These two approaches merely reflect an alternate interpretation of the same underlying mathematics—but share the same core conviction: individuality doesn’t matter.

Physicians, too, were staunchly opposed to the use of the average to evaluate individuals under their care. “You can tell your patient that, of every hundred such cases, eighty are cured … but that will scarcely move him. What he wants to know is whether he is numbered among those who are cured,” wrote Claude Bernard, the French doctor regarded as the father of experimental medicine, in 1865.49 “Physicians have nothing to do with what is called the law of large numbers, a law which, according to a great mathematician’s expression, is always true in general and false in particular.”50 Yet

For example, he determined that the optimal amount of coal to shovel in a single swing was 21 pounds. Taylor then standardized the entire industrial process around these averages so that the way to perform each task became fixed and inviolable (in the case of coal shoveling, he insisted that special shovels optimized to carry 21 pounds were always used), and workers were not permitted to deviate from these standards—just as I was required to stamp aluminum in a precisely prescribed way.

What was worse, when I complained about how these jobs failed to take my own personality into account, leaving me feeling helpless and bored, I was often accused of being lazy or irresponsible. In a standardized system, individuality does not matter, and that was exactly what Taylor intended.

Before Taylor, companies viewed “nonproductive” employees who sat at a desk without doing physical labor as an unnecessary expense.

Even though Taylorism was often equated with American capitalism, its appeal crossed borders and ideologies. In Soviet Russia, Lenin heralded scientific management as the key to jump-starting Russian factories and organizing five-year industrial plans, and by the start of World War II, Frederick Taylor was as famous in the Soviet Union as Franklin Roosevelt.

Thorndike was an enthusiastic advocate of the ideas of Francis Galton, whom he revered as “an eminently fair scientific man.”35 He agreed with Galton’s notion of rank, the theory that if a person was talented at one thing, he was likely to be talented at most other things, too.

To answer this question, physicists worked out a set of mathematical principles known as ergodic theory that specified exactly when you could use information about a group to draw conclusions about individual members of the group.

According to ergodic theory, you are allowed to use a group average to make predictions about individuals if two conditions are true: (1) every member of the group is identical, and (2) every member of the group will remain the same in the future.10 If a particular group of entities fulfills these two conditions, the group is considered to be “ergodic,” in which case it is fine to use the average behavior of the group to make predictions about an individual.

It takes little effort to say things like “She is smarter than average,” or “He was ranked second in his graduating class,” or “She is an introvert,” concise statements that seem true because they appear to be based on forthright mathematics. That is why averagarianism was a perfect philosophy for the industrial age, an era when managers—whether in businesses or schools—needed an efficient way to sift through large numbers of people and put them in their proper slots in a standardized, stratified system.

Recall that the two defining assumptions of the Age of Average are Quetelet’s conviction that the average is the ideal, and the individual is error, and Galton’s conviction that if someone is Eminent at one thing they are likely Eminent at most things. In contrast, the main assumption of the science of the individual is that individuality matters

The primary research method of averagarianism is aggregate, then analyze: First, combine many people together and look for patterns in the group. Then, use these group patterns (such as averages and other statistics) to analyze and model individuals.21 The science of the individual instead instructs scientists to analyze, then aggregate: First, look for patterns within each individual.

While studying animals early in her career, Thelen discovered that many instinctive behaviors that biologists insisted were fixed and rigid were actually highly variable, depending in large part on the unique quirks of each individual animal.

There is one difficulty presented by this individual-first approach: it requires a great deal of data, far more data than averagarian approaches. In most fields that study human beings, we didn’t have the tools one hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago to acquire and manage the extensive data necessary to effectively analyze, then aggregate.

What, precisely, is jaggedness? 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. Jaggedness is not just about human size; almost every human characteristic that we care about—including talent, intelligence, character, creativity, and so on—is jagged.

Women have long protested the artificially exaggerated dimensions of Mattel’s Barbie doll, but the principle of jaggedness tells us that an average-size doll—a Norma-size doll—is just as phony.

In most fields of psychology and education, if you find a correlation of, say, 0.4 (the correlation between SAT scores and first-semester college grades47), it is usually assumed you have found something important and meaningful. Yet, according to the mathematics of correlation, if you find a 0.4 correlation between two dimensions, that means you have managed to explain 16 percent of the behavior of each dimension.

turned out that SAT scores and the prestige of a candidate’s alma mater were not predictive at all. Neither was winning programming competitions. Grades mattered a little, but only for the first three years after you graduated. “But the real surprise for me and for a lot of people at Google,” Carlisle told me, “was that when we analyzed the data we couldn’t find a single variable that mattered for even most of the jobs at Google. Not one.”52 In other

When confronted with the Myers-Briggs, for instance, we tend to instinctively map our personality onto its structure, quickly deciding if we are introverts or extroverts, thinkers or feelers, judgmental or perceptive. Similarly, if asked to describe the personality of our best friend—or our worst enemy—we would most likely offer a list of their prominent traits.

But here’s the problem: when it comes to predicting the behavior of individuals—as opposed to predicting the average behavior of a group of people—traits actually do a poor job. In fact, correlations between personality traits and behaviors that should be related—such as aggression and getting into fights, or extroversion and going to parties—are rarely stronger than 0.30.

The human resources industry was born out of Taylorism, with personnel departments tasked with looking for average employees to fill average jobs.

If our personality feels stable and steadfast, it’s because it is stable and steadfast—within a given context. Astrologers figured this out long ago, which is why horoscopes often seem persuasive—if the astrologer informs us that Leos are sometimes shy, well, we are all shy sometimes. It just depends on the context.

Other people’s personalities seem stable to us, however, for a different reason: we tend to interact with most people within a narrow range of contexts.

Or we can follow Celeste Kidd’s lead—she told me that any time she finds herself judging someone based on behaviors that strike her as insensitive or irrational, she stops herself, takes a step back, and tries to imagine a set of circumstances that would make the behavior rational and sensible. Most of the time, she realizes that she was projecting her own context onto the other person instead of appreciating his.

The key assumption of normative thinking is that the right pathway is the one followed by the average person, or at least the average member of a particular group we hope to emulate, such as successful graduates or professionals.

The normal time it takes to reach a milestone (such as crawling) or a career goal (like running our own marketing agency) is embedded in our mind like an ever-present stopwatch. If our child starts crawling later than normal, or our former classmate makes director of marketing ahead of schedule, then we often feel like we (and our child) are falling behind.

In 2004, anthropologist David Tracer was studying the aboriginal Au tribe in Papua New Guinea when he was struck by an odd revelation: even though he had been observing the Au for twenty years, he had never seen an Au baby crawl.10 Not one.

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.

One student might breeze through material on fractions, for instance, but grind through material on decimals; another student might fly through decimals, but take extra time for fractions. There was no such thing as a “fast” learner or a “slow” learner.

Of course, the conclusion that logically follows from this is both obvious and terrible: by demanding that our students learn at one fixed pace, we are artificially impairing the ability of many to learn and succeed. What one person can learn, most people can learn if they are allowed to adjust their pacing.