The End of Average
How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
Editorial Review
From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it. Today, however, we are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world, a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters. This new idea will have a profound impact on our institutions—instead of viewing talent as a scarce commodity, schools will be able to nurture excellence in every student, and employers will be able to hire and retain a wider range of high-impact employees.
Book Reviews
Books on Related Topics
With irresistibly persuasive vigor, David Shenk debunks the long-standing notion of genetic “giftedness,” and presents dazzling new scientific research showing how greatness is in the reach of every individual. DNA does not make us who we are. “Forget everything you think you know about genes, talent, and intelligence,” he writes.
Practical wisdom is the essential human quality that combines the fruits of our individual experiences with our empathy and intellect-an aim that Aristotle identified millennia ago. It's learning the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person, at a particular time. But we have
Today, many psychologists are developing new accounts of how personality works based on the rapid accumulation of findings of the field, namely, the theory of a new human intelligence – a mental capacity that we use to guide our lives – to reason about ourselves and other people. This ability to
Wisdom to Share
As a school student, a college candidate, or a prospective employee, you are always graded and ranked by comparing your performance to the average peer; the “average” controls your opportunities and constricts your choices.
Quetelet declared that the individual person was synonymous with error, while the average person represented the true human being.
Quetelet claimed that every one of us is a flawed copy of some kind of cosmic template for human beings. He dubbed this template the “Average Man.”
For Quetelet, the Average Man was perfection itself, an ideal that Nature aspired to, free from Error with a capital “E.” He declared that the greatest men in history were closest to the Average Man of their place and time.
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.
Much of the time, we don’t even think about what, exactly, we’re trying so hard to be above-average at, because the why is so clear: we can only achieve success in the Age of Average if others do not view us as mediocre or—disaster!—as below-average.
The main assumption of the science of the individual is that individuality matters—the individual is not error, and on the human qualities that matter most (like talent, intelligence, personality, and character) individuals cannot be reduced to a single score.
Recognizing our own jaggedness is the first step to understanding our full potential and refusing to be caged in by arbitrary, average-based pronouncements of who we are expected to be.
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.
The reason many students struggled in school had nothing to do with differences in the capacity to learn, and everything to do with artificial constraints imposed on the education process, especially fixed-pace group instruction.
If the architecture of higher education is based upon the false premise that students can be sorted by their rank, then no matter how great the triumphs this system might produce, it is still guaranteed to produce some failures that we simply cannot tolerate as a society.
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