Being average is not a bad thing

This man is what every average man including me would envy. He is a inventor, innovator, entrepreneur and obviously a billionaire. He is athletic and super fit and handsome to the extreme.  He has a fleet of extreme cars, yacht and lives in a palatial mansion. HE can change super model girlfriends like changing his shirt. He is a philanthropist and when he is not saving the poor and downtrodden, he is then helping charities with millions in donation. The man is Bruce Wayne, your friendly Batman.

Such fictional characters are created because of the need of a hero who is the embodiment of perfection, everything we desire to have and be. Every human culture has such type of figures, the gallant knight killing dragons, and great warriors defeating the enemy singlehandedly and rescuing the princess. Such fictional characters are always doing what is right, no matter what. We conjured up these fictional characters to cope up with the feeling of powerlessness within ourselves. These things have come up in our comic strips and the whole commercial movie industry is cashing on it for around a hundred years.

But wait, then does being and average mediocre person sucks. If there are 7.2 billion people on earth and at any point of time only about a 1000 people enjoy some sort of worldwide influence. That means to rest has to be satisfied with the limited scope of their life and whatever we may do will not affect any significant majority. Our life and death will go unnoticed.

Around 65 percent of the population have average qualities be it intelligence, memory, happiness, creativity and leadership potential to name a few. But most will rate them above average, because if we tell someone that he is average then most likely he will take it as an insult. The need to be unique is steadily rising among the people in the last 50-70 years. It is a type of narcissist symptom. A study has shown that in the 1950s 12 percent students considered themselves to be important, this increased to 80 percent in the 1980s. And now people will prefer to be unique in a bad way than normal in a good way.

But being average is not a bad thing. You can avoid major physical and psychological illness by being average. Desirable qualities like ambition, confidence and sociability can be problematic when taken to the extreme. You can see cases where ambition becomes greed, sociability turns to show-off and confidence turns to arrogance. These can lead to self centric thinking and selfishness. Your average qualities are far better than the overconfident delusion.

At a more basic level of genetics, life experiences and social upbringing we are all unique in our own way but the self help industry will try to sell this same uniqueness to you, ‘to be yourself’ which is quite comic. The consumerist society now glorifies this nonconformist and unconventionality, but it is all a decoy to nudge people into doing things, thinking and buying things. They try to exploit this hidden desire for being special in all of us.

We need to understand that other than fictional characters, everyone is pretty average. Those who excel are excellent in one or two fields only. Some may be good in math, some may be a great athlete or a businessman, but in all other aspects they as much average as the majority are. We have to dedicate time and energy in a particular field to excel and as we have limited time and energy so we can excel in only a limited number of field, mostly one. Then there is genetics and what we call in born ability which is random. So there will be still a difference between those achieving greater heights because of their inborn quality than those slogging hard in that field.

Brilliant athletes may be a total jerk in real life, extraordinary businessman may have serious family issues and celebrity whom people follow in every step may be clueless about life. The world is actually optimized for mediocrity. The exceptional 1 percent may be defining things but it is the rest 99 percent who are actually making them exceptional. If the 1 percent invents and innovates then it is the 99 percent who bring it to the masses through their hard work and effort. A bulb invented by Edison reaches our house because of the 99 percent, so their role cannot be undermined.

But mediocrity can be a result but not the goal. When we make effort to be someone special and unique and fail, it is acceptable, but that does not mean we should not try. When we stop trying then we make it our goal to be mediocre. Few accept this. There is only place for few in the top slot. For a Messi, a million kids are slogging in the parks with football- for a Tolstoy an million like me are scribbling our thoughts.

This generation of internet and social media focuses only on the top slot. That’s what drives the rest of us to have a pie of it. We are busy viewing the best of the best, the worst of the worst, the greatest feats and the scariest threats. It is a form of social tyranny which is pushing people to the edge, as if other than that life would be a failure. That’s why now people are using the good and the bad side of it to be that someone exceptional. We look for shortcuts to reach there, and forget that a 30 second video of a mountaineer standing on top of Everest has taken years of training and hard work.

Once we disconnect the word failure and mediocrity and seek fulfilment and appreciation in small things in life – then the feeling of anxiety and inadequacy will evaporate. This will free you from the feeling of a mundane existence and can push you to do something extraordinary without the baggage of judgement and lofty expectation.