An Above Average Book

Each week at the end of my Friday Top Tips newsletter I sign off with the words "have an average week" even though almost everybody else in the world is imploring you to strive to be the best version of you and to live every day as if it's your last.

Nah, it's much more important to be average and in this blog post I'll explain why. 

In my twenties I went through a stage of reading classic American novels. It was a really enjoyable time because there’s so much good stuff. I quite enjoy having a theme to read around.

If you fancy it yourself there’s lots of short ones to get started with like The Catcher in The Rye, The Call Of The Wild, Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird or The Old Man and The Sea. They’re all brilliant but it was the meatier tomes that really drew me in. 

American writers really seem to enjoy telling rambling, drawn out stories, detailing past events over a long period of time. There seem to be lots of family sagas like The World According To Garp, which introduced me to the whole John Irving catalogue. 

So much good stuff. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is stunning. Paul Theroux’s novels are great and his travelogues even better.

Catch 22 is just superb. It’s Joseph Heller’s best book by a country mile. When it was put to him that he’d never been able to match or surpass it, and not written anything else as good as Catch 22 he replied “That's true, I haven’t, but then again neither has anybody else.” Fair enough.

Down By The Water

One of my favourites, even though it’s not really a novel, was Lake Wobegon Days. The book is a collection of short stories the author Garrison Keillor had already delivered as monologues over the radio.

Each radio episode would open with “Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown . . .” and you would know you were about to be lulled into the safe warm satire of Keillor’s fictional but oh so real community.

Keillor would end his ‘reports’ in the same way every time too, signing off with “That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

That last line always stayed in my head, because it’s so funny but incredibly insightful. There’s a very real truth about it because most people do believe that they are above average. 

Illusory superiority is the official phrase for this phenomenon although some refer to it as the Lake Wobegon Effect which would get my vote if voting were permitted on such things.

Nobody Does It Better

It’s a natural tendency to overestimate one’s own capabilities and most people think they are better than average. Obviously, because of the very way averages work, this patently can’t be right, but very few put themselves in the lesser bracket.

Michael Gove, when he was the UK's Education Secretary, wanted every school in the country to be classed as ‘good’ by Ofsted. The only problem was that to be classed as ‘good’ pupil performance had to exceed the national average. So . . . yeah, a Lake Wobegon moment.

When this mathematical impossibility was pointed out to him Gove insisted it was still possible for schools to achieve it “by getting better all the time.”

Ah well, simpler times.

She’s Got Legs

One of my favourite pieces of information is the fact that I have more than the average number of legs.

The confused look on your face right now is similar to the look I usually receive when I share this unusual snippet.

I’m not special and I’m not alone in being above average in this respect. Most people, in fact, have more than the average number of legs.

The number of legs I possess is two, in case you were wondering.

It’s very simple. 

Most people have two legs. 

No people, as far as I’m aware, have three legs.

Due to birth defects, medical surgeries and unfortunate accidents quite a lot of people have fewer than two legs. Sometimes just one and sometimes none at all.

This of course brings the average down and therefore the average number of legs is slightly less than two. So I’ve got more than the average.

Little By Little

Anyway this all brings us to this post's Top Tip which is the advice to ‘have an average day’. 

It’s a phrase I heard from Michael Neill. He’s a coach and an author and I really like his laid back approach. The instruction to have an average day exemplifies his chilled out take on things.

A few years ago I attended a talk and Michael signed the book I bought with that very phrase.

In our goal oriented, task driven, world of diaries and to do lists it seems counter-intuitive to be content with only an ‘average day’.

Surely we should be out there smashing it. Striving to squeeze the most out of every single second. We should be trying win the day, not accept an average one right?

The power of being average is deceptive. The key is to be average a heck of a lot. Do average things on a regular basis. Be average  over and over again. Being consistently average over time can have incredible results.

Mr Writer

This is something I fail at quite a lot. I tend to dive into a project, thrash about madly, achieve something glorious and then follow that up with an eternity of mediocrity. A barren desert of dearth that stretches for what seems like forever.

Until I see another shiny piece of silver paper dancing in the breeze and off I go chasing it with wild abandon. Again. 

Seriously, I would be better off by being having more average days.

I write this newsletter easily enough every week but some of my other writing projects are ludicrously behind schedule.

If I was to have an average day where I wrote, say, just 500 words that could well be much better. Let’s say I did only 500 words Monday to Friday and didn’t go near the laptop at the weekends. That sounds a pitiful amount.

And let’s make it even easier by giving me twelve full weeks off. Twelve! Well, why not? So I write only 500 words and only on weekdays for just forty weeks out of fifty two available.

Sounds hardly worth firing the keyboard up.

But let’s look at the math!

500 words x 5 days x 40 weeks = 100,000 words

One hundred thousand words is a heck of a lot. That’s a John Grisham novel amount of words.

If I wrote just a measly 500 words every workday for less than a year I’d have one hundred thousand words under my belt. The cumulative effect of a series of average days is actually quite extraordinary.

Average White Band

So what will you decide to be average at?

Choose an area of life that you want to make great changes in and set some incredibly average goals.

What would be:

       - An average amount of exercise?

       - An average amount of DIY?

       - An average amount of sales calls?

Set yourself an average goal and go and be average about it.