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In Defense of Being Average PDF
In Defense of Being Average PDF
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http://markmanson.net/being-average
Theres this guy. World-renowned billionaire. Tech genius. Inventor and entrepreneur. Athletic and talented and
handsome with a jaw so chiseled it looks like Zeus came down from Olympus and carved the fucker himself.
This guys got a small fleet of sports cars, a few yachts, and when hes not giving millions of dollars to charities, hes
changing out supermodel girlfriends like other people change their socks.
This guys smile can melt the damn room. His charm is so thick you can swim in it. Half of his friends were TIMEs
Man of the Year. And the ones who werent dont care because they could buy the magazine if they wanted to. When
this guy isnt jetsetting around the world or coming up with the latest technological innovation to save the planet, he
spends his time helping the weak and helpless and downtrodden.
This man is, you guessed it, Bruce Wayne. Also known as the Batman. And (spoiler alert) he doesnt actually exist. He
is fiction.
Its an interesting facet of human nature that we seem to have a need to come up with these sort of fictional heroes
that embody perfection and everything we wish we could be. Medieval Europe had its tales about gallant knights
slaying dragons and saving princesses. Ancient Rome and Greece had their myths about heroes who won wars
single-handedly and in some cases confronted the Gods themselves. Every other human culture is replete with such
fantastical stories as well.
And today, we have comic book superheroes. Take Superman. I mean, the guy is basically a God with a human body
wearing a blue jumpsuit and red underpants on inside-out. He is indestructible and unbeatable. And the only thing as
sturdy as his physical fortitude is his moral fortitude. In Supermans world, justice is always black/white, and
Superman never wavers from doing whats right. No matter what.
I dont think Im exactly shaking up the field of psychology by suggesting that, as humans, we have a need to conjure
up these heroes to help us cope with our own feelings of powerlessness. There are over 7.2 billion people on this
planet, and really only about 1,000 of those have major worldwide influence at any given time. That leaves the other
7,199,999,000 +/- of us to come to terms with the limited scope of our lives and the fact that the vast majority of what
we do will likely not matter long after weve died. This is not a fun thing to think about or accept.
Today, I want to take a detour from our make more, buy more, fuck more culture and argue for the merits of
mediocrity, of being blas boring and average.
Not the merits of pursuing mediocrity, mind you because we all should try to do the best we possibly can but
rather, the merits of accepting mediocrity when we end up there despite our best efforts.
This here is called a bell curve. Any of you who have taken a statistics class and survived will recognize it.
A bell curve is quite simple. Take a population of people, like, lets say people who play golf at least once a year. The
horizontal axis represents how good they are at golf. Further to the right means theyre really good, further to the left
means theyre really bad.
Now, notice that it gets really thin at the far ends of the curve. That means there are a few people who are really,
really good at golf. And a few people who are really, really bad. The majority fall into the mediocre middle.
We can apply a curve in this way to tons of things in a population. Height. Weight. Emotional maturity. Wages. How
often people like to fuck. And so on. 1
For example, this is Michael Jordan dunking a basketball:
Its well-known that hes one of the best to ever do it. Therefore, hes way on the right side of the bell curve, better
than 99.99% of anyone else who has ever dunked a basketball. Few can compare.
Obviously, hes no Michael Jordan. In fact, chances are many people reading this right now could do much better than
this guy. That means hes probably towards the bottom end of the bell curve, an extreme on the other side.
We stand in awe of MJ because hes more athletic than all of us. 2 We laugh at the trampoline guy because hes less
athletic than most of us. Both are at different extremes of the bell curve. And most of us are the majority in the middle.
Its my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptional is the new normal.
And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and desperate to feel exceptional all the
time. So we must compensate. Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off
across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award. Others
do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes.
Theres this kind of psychological tyranny in our culture today, a sense that we must always be proving that were
special, unique, exceptional all the time, no matter what, only to have that moment of exceptionalism swept away in
the current of all the other human greatness thats constantly happening.
For instance, heres a five minute video of nothing but some of the most amazing feats you can imagine:
The crazy thing is that every single person in this video, for their five seconds of incredible footage, likely spent years
and years and years practicing their craft as well as dozens of hours of recording to just get that perfect five second
spot.
Yet we are not exposed to those years of practice. Or those hours of drab and failed footage. Were merely exposed
to each persons absolute finest moment possibly in their entire lives.
And then we watch this and forget about it within minutes. Because were onto the next thing. And then the next.
Its an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary.
Celebrities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it. Each and every one of us can be
extraordinary. We all deserve greatness.
The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory after all, if everyone was extraordinary, then by definition, no
one would be extraordinary is missed by most people, and instead we eat the message up and ask for more.
(More tacos, that is.)
Being average has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the
middle of the bell curve.
The problem is that, statistically speaking, pretty much all of us are in the middle of that bell curve almost all of the
time, in almost everything we do. Sure, you might be a world-class putt-putt golfer. But then you have to go home and
be a lousy father and get drunk on cheap beer faster than 90% of the population and piss the bed at night. Or worse,
you could be Tiger Woods. No one stays exceptional for very long.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept being mediocre, then theyll
never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life doesnt matter.
I find this sort of thinking to be dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is only worthwhile if it is truly
notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And
ethically speaking, that is a really dark place to put yourself.
But most peoples problem with accepting being average is more practical. They worry that, If I accept that Im
average, then Ill never achieve anything great. Ill have no motivation to improve myself or do something great. What