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The smallest choices you and I make, every single day, can change the world for better or worse. The simple act of refusing to live a lie has the power to transform who we are and what we are capable of, both as individuals and as a society.
In other words, trying our best to live a congruent life is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other.
“Which man is bigger? It seems like there should be an easy answer, but when you compare the two men on each dimension, the answer turns out to be more elusive than we might expect. The man on the right is tall but has narrow shoulders. The man on the left has a large waist but nearly average-size hips. You might attempt to determine which man is bigger by simply taking the average of all nine of each man’s dimensions—except... you would discover that each man’s average size is nearly identical. At the same time, we can see that it would be misleading to say they are the same size—or to describe either one of them as average: the man on the left is average on two dimensions (reach and chest), while the man on the right is barely average on only one dimension (waist). There is no simple answer to the question, ‘Which man is bigger?’
...[This] reveals an important truth about human beings and the first principle of individuality: the jaggedness principle. This principle holds that we cannot apply one-dimensional thinking to understand something that is complex and ‘jagged’... 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... is jagged.
[...] Height is one-dimensional, so it is perfectly acceptable to rank people according to how tall they are. But human size is a different story: it is composed of many different dimensions that are not strongly linked... if we were to expand the average band to include the middle 90 percent of each dimension, instead of the middle 30 percent... You might guess that most people’s bodies would surely lie within such a wide range. In actuality, less than half of all people would.20 It turns out that most of us have at least one body part that is rather large or rather small. That is why a cockpit designed for the average is a cockpit designed for nobody.
...[I]gnoring the multidimensionality of size is never a good compromise. When it matters, there are no shortcuts: you can only produce a good fit if you think about size in terms of all its dimensions.”
— Todd Rose, The End of Average
Why No One is Normal And How to Focus On Individual Uniqueness
What does it mean to be normal? According to psychologist Todd Rose, there’s no such thing as “normal” or “average.” Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, and we are all best defined by our individuality.
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Todd Rose: Human invention
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Todd Rose: Hardest part of learning
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Todd Rose: The End of Average
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This is the lesson of Kim Campbell: fit creates opportunity. If the environment is a bad match with our individuality... our performance will always be artificially impaired. If we do get a good fit with our environment... we will have the opportunity to show what we are truly capable of. This means that if we want equal opportunity for everyone, if we want a society where each one of us has the same chance to live up to our full potential, then we must create professional, educational, and social institutions that are responsive to individuality... If we see that the Average Man of one group is receiving different access to educational, professional, legal, and medical experiences than the Average Man of aother group, then averagarian thinking suggests that the fair thing to do is to try to make those two Average Men as similar as possible... it was the best we could do to address unfairness in a standardized world... [But] if there is no such thing as an average person, then there can never be equal opportunity on average. Only equal fit creates equal opportunity.
Todd Rose, The End of Average
