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The Law of Average Joes

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake;
you are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
We are all part of the same compost heap;
we are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

- Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

I call it The Law of Average Joes:
On average, you are average.

You may have a very discintive nose, or a distinctive thought process, or a distinctive emotional pattern… but on average, you’re just like everybody else.

On first glance, this can seem rather offputting… almost insulting. In a culture where individuality is prized above all else, the notion that there are more similarities than differences between us can seem like an attack.

“But my differences are what make me, ME!”

-Anonymous

Anonymous has a great point, and I don’t think his/her words are necessarily false or untrue… but I don’t think what I’m saying and what anonymous are saying are any different. However, what I am saying, is that I think that in our quest to be individual, we’ve lost sight of our similarities. And, far from it liberating us, I think that we’ve ended up making things harder than they should be.

What am I talking about?

Well, let’s say that someone wanted to figure out how to change a habit. They might start out with brute force, just trying to stop cold turkey. If that didn’t work, they’d try a variety of different techniques, whatever made sense to them, until they finally found an effective way to change the habit. But what if they decided that before they tried to change the habit, they would first start with The Law of Average Joes. Rather than starting from scratch, they would start out trying to find other people who succesfully changed habits, and find, on average, the techniques that seemed to be most effective. Even better, they might try to find someone who has done Research on how the average joe changes a habit. Again, not every technique would work perfectly for them, but, on average, most of the techniques would.

Seems pretty common sense, almost not worth making a post about… except I think we often discount The Law of Average Joes in the name of uniqueness and individuality.

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

-Douglas Adams

As Mr. Adams eloquently points out, we often fail to use many of the great resources at our disposal to take advantage of The Law of Average Joes, such as “recorded history,” “scientific research,” and (probably the most frequently discounted of all), “advice.”

To illustrate this point, lets take an example that isn’t quite as neutral as changing a habit… happiness. Surely, happiness is a personal and individual thing… surely no two people have ever become happy in quite the same way. While this is true, The Law of Average Joes still holds. Turns out, that while the specifics are different from person to person, on average, people who are happy are happy for similar reasons. If being happy is one of your goals (and isn’t it on most people’s top tens?) you may want to check out some of the cool and relatively recent research being done in positive psychology.

The fact that “on average, you are average”, leads to some other very liberating conclusions. Of course, this law does not discriminate… it applies to everybody. When you then apply it to the comparison of two people, you arrive at what you might call The Second Formulation of The Law of Average Joes:

You have as much in common with any given person as you have differences with them.

So why is this liberating?

“So, let us not be blind to our differences – but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.”

- John F. Kennedy

Because it means you can find common ground with ANYONE. When you realize that you have more in common with someone than there are differences, you realize that there’s no such thing as “Us and Them”… there’s just Us. And that my friends is a very liberating thing to realize. By focusing on and finding our similarities first, we can then have common ground through which to work through our differences.

So now that we know that The Law Average Joes applies to both groups and individuals, the next logical step is to ask how we can raise the odds. We know that things that work for most people on average should work for us too… but how can we get those odds to be ABOVE average? The answer lies in what we’ll call The Law of Similar Differences:

For every time that an individual or group deviates from average in the same way you do, this will increase your chance of success.

So in practical terms, how would one use this law?

Well, in the 1960’s, researchers needed to use this law to fix the problem of malnourished children in third world countries. They started out using The Law of Average Joes… asking themselves what the average joe did to keep their children nourished. Unfortunately, they ran into a stumbling block. The techniques the average joe used to keep their children nourished required money… money that their target joes just didn’t have.

This is when they turned to The Law of Similar Differences… they started to look for households in the same countries, at the same poverty levels, which against all odds had properly nourished children. They then found the common behaviors among all these households, not present in the malnourished households, and found the right behaviors to teach the malnourished households. In Vietnam, Save the Children used this method to reduce malnutrition by nearly 80%.

On a personal level, I used The Law of Similar Differences to find a time management and planning system that worked for me. First, I took a look at what the consensus was online… what worked for the average joe. I found Getting Things Done, which seemed to come highly recommended. I used it, and many things definitely worked for me, but there were a few areas that I felt were a little off. So I went to someone I knew online who was planning and managing many of the same things I was, but was doing it way better than me. He recommended Zen to Done and I haven’t looked back since.

So there you have it, The Law of Average Joes and it’s derivatives. Tools for figuring out what works. Do you agree with The Law of Average Joes? Disagree? Leave a comment and let me know.

-Matt

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March 1st, 2009 | Tags: , | Category: Goal Setting and Planning, Life Hacks | 366 comments

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