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

by Todd Rose

every student follows a unique pathway that unfolds at his or her own highly individualized pace.

makes you really wonder how much all of the labels a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time.”36

If every student learns at a different pace, and if individual students learn at different paces at different times and for different material, then the idea that we should expect every student to learn at a fixed pace is irredeemably flawed. Think about it: Were you really not good at math or science? Or was the classroom just not aligned to your learning pace?

second assertion of the pathways principle: there are no universally fixed sequences in human development—no set of stages everyone must pass through to grow, learn, or achieve goals.

gave them “Gesell scores” indicating how their physical and mental development compared to the norm.43 If a child failed to progress through the proper sequence of stages, parents were often told (or left to assume) that something might be wrong with their child.

today his ideas still form the basis for the “normal” ages for developmental milestones used in many pediatric guides and popular parenting books.47

“There are no ladders,” Fischer once told me. “Instead, each one of us has our own web of development, where each new step we take opens up a whole range of new possibilities that unfold according to our own individuality.”

we are always creating our own pathway for the first time, inventing it as we go along, since every decision we make—or every event we experience—changes the possibilities available to us.

if we cannot depend on familiar guideposts, what can we rely on to know how we’re doing?

the only way to judge if we are on the right path is by judging how the path fits our individuality.

I was the only one who would be able to figure out what that path looked like. And to do that, I knew that I needed to know who I was first.

the jaggedness principle, context principle, and pathways principle ultimately all work hand in hand.

brave new paths and try unexplored directions—they are more likely to lead to success than following the average pathway.

Matthew got a job pushing carts in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Costco. Since then, Matthew has been promoted several times, carving out a career that he loves in the process. “For his entire life, Matthew has been classified and known by his ‘special needs,’” wrote his brother. “Since the day he began at Costco, however, his coworkers and customers have valued him because of his unique strengths.”10 Costco didn’t evaluate Matthew by comparing his traits to those of an average employee; they evaluated him by what he brought to his job as an individual.

Vembu discovered that there was little or no correlation between academic performance (as measured by grades and the perceived quality of the diploma) and on-the-job performance.

If you believe that talent can be found anywhere, then one way to act upon this belief would be to cultivate the talent yourself.

Vembu was so opposed to the values of averagarianism that he decided not to operate the university according to the traditional standardize-and-rank mission of most schools. Almost all the instruction is self-paced and project based. There are no grades; instead, students get feedback on their projects. “We realize that students learn at their own pace, and you have to respect that,” Vembu emphasized to me. “If what you care about is how well students will do in your company over the next decade, you soon realize that fast and slow are useless distinctions to make. There just isn’t a relationship between learning fast and succeeding.”

Since Vembu does not agree with evaluating people based on averages, there are no performance reviews at Zoho, no scorecards, and no employee rankings. “Placing a grade or a number on a human being is nonsense. Our philosophy is that if there is a manager that has a concern with a team member, they should have a one-on-one discussion then and there and help them.”36

That sense of belonging and personal purpose—that sense that you can add value to the company by sharing your ideas, and that the ideas will be listened to and, if they are good ideas, implemented—is at the heart of Morning Star’s success.

People are happiest when they have control over everything that’s important to them.”

since its relentless focus on one-dimensional rankings compels every student to do exactly the same things the average student does. Be the same as everyone else, only better.

Even before they enter college, the system pressures students to conformity: if they want to get admitted to a good college, students need to take the same classes, tests, and extracurricular activities that everyone else is taking—but do better than everyone else.

Once in college, students have to take the same courses as everyone in their major, in the same amount of time, to be ranked against the average, and to earn at the end of four years an undifferentiated diploma—all at a huge financial cost to them and their parents.

The promise of our averagarian system of higher education keeps going down, while the costs imposed by the system keep going up.

To transform the averagarian architecture of our existing system into a system that values the individual student requires that we adopt these three key concepts: • Grant credentials, not diplomas • Replace grades with competency • Let students determine their educational pathway

There is a logical alternative to diplomas as the basic unit of educational achievement: credentials.14 Credentialing is an approach to education that emphasizes awarding credit for the smallest meaningful unit of learning.

“If someone proposed combining measures of height, weight, diet, and exercise into a single number or mark to represent a person’s physical condition, we would consider it laughable. . . . Yet every day, teachers combine aspects of students’ achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior into a single grade that’s recorded on a report card and no one questions it.”19

replace grades with a measure of competency

Instead of awarding grades for accumulating seat time in a course, completing all your homework on time, and acing your midterm, credentials would be given if, and only if, you demonstrate competency in the relevant skills, abilities, and knowledge needed for that particular credential.

it should be pass/incomplete—either you have demonstrated the competency or you have not.

you should be able to acquire the necessary competency for a credential in whatever way you like.

they should be professionally aligned.

Just about the only aspect of your education you do have control over is what university to apply to, and what to major in. We must cede more control to individual students by ensuring that our educational architecture supports self-determined pathways

With self-determined competency-based credentialing, there are fewer penalties for experimenting in order to discover what you are truly passionate about, and even fewer costs for switching horses midstream. In fact, if it is designed to support self-determination the entire educational system should encourage you to constantly re-assess what you like to do and what you might be good at, and give you a natural way to adjust your career plans as you go along according to what you learn about yourself and according to the changing job marketplace.

These three concepts—granting credentials, not diplomas; replacing grades with competency; and letting students determine their educational pathways—can help transform higher education from a system modeled after Taylorist factories that values top-down hierarchy and standardization, to a dynamic ecosystem where each student can pursue the education that suits her or him best.

instead of trying to be like everyone else, only better, students will strive to be the very best version of themselves.

fit creates opportunity. If the environment is a bad match with our individuality—if we cannot reach the controls in the cockpit—our performance will always be artificially impaired.

If we do get a good fit with our environment—whether that environment is a cockpit, a classroom, or a corner office—we will have the opportunity to show what we are truly capable of.

almost everything in traditional educational systems remains designed to ensure students receive the same exact standardized experience.

We continue to enforce a curriculum that defines not only what students learn, but also how, when, at what pace, and in what order they learn it.

traditional public education systems violate the principles of individuality.

require that educational assessments be built to measure individual learning and development rather than simply ranking students against one another.

Imagine the talent that we can unleash by redesigning our schools and jobs to fit the individual, instead of fitting the averagarian system—even

We all feel the weight of the one-dimensional thinking that has become so pervasive in our averagarian culture: a standardized educational system that ceaselessly sorts and ranks us; a workplace that hires us based on these educational rankings, then frequently imposes new rankings at every annual performance review; a society that doles out rewards, esteem, and adoration according to our professional ranking. When we look up at these artificial, arbitrary, and meaningless rungs that we are expected to climb, we worry that we might not fully ascend them, that we will be denied those opportunities that are only afforded to those who muscle their way up the one-dimensional ladder.

We worry that if we, or our children, are labeled “different” we will have no chance of succeeding in school and will be destined to a life on the lower rungs.

We live in a world that demands we be the same as everyone else, only better, and reduces the American dream to a narrow yearning to be relatively better than the people around us, rather than the best version of ourselves.

Our health-care system is moving toward personalized medicine, with the goal of equal fit for every patient.