Watching the Summer Olympics, something I do with a religious fervor every four years, would not be so intimidating were it not that many of the athletes are also so maddeningly gifted in other areas of their lives. Obviously, in addition to their hard work and dedication to the task at hand, they have a lot going for them. Woody Allen might have quipped that 90% of life is just showing up, but that is certainly not how one gets to the Olympics. Even so, it is clear that these athletes started life with an awful lot of talent in the tank.

How many of the swimmers, just to take one example, attend elite and difficult universities such as Stanford on their way to careers in law, medicine, or as captains of business? It would be one thing if it were “just” school smarts and athletic prowess that these young men and women have in abundance, but such is the breadth of their talents that they seem destined for success no matter what they do. 

As I watch, transfixed on their other-worldly feats of athletic excellence, I am awash with awe, admiration, and a tinge of something akin to depression. Sometimes when the gods decide to bestow special gifts on a mere mortal, they do so in such dazzling abundance that those of us on the sidelines are left feeling small in comparison.

I get depressed? By watching a sporting event? Seriously? Well, ok…it’s more of a light despondency than clinical depression. Nor is it envy. For although I have enjoyed sports from an early age, it was obvious even then that a storyteller like the poet A.E. Housman (author of the famous poem To an Athlete Dying Young) was never going to record my sporting accomplishments in song and legend. But watching such things—whether it be the Olympics, a theatrical production, in academia, podcasting, or wherever talent finds its home, makes clear the stark contrast in their lives and mine—which while meaningful, happy, and content, still hovers at or below that beloved 50th percentile area under the Bell Curve. For it is here where “average” lives and none of the thousands of self-help books featured prominently in bookstores can change this.

After watching the 2016 Summer Olympics, enjoying some fine films while on vacation, and tucking into some cracking good reading, I suddenly became fascinated by all that average embodies. As I watched and read I witnessed, once again, just how impressive the gifted and talented realy are. The gifted do many things well and they do them with an ease that would have made the Greek gods jealous. It was pretty easy to see that they are above average and I am not, but I discvored that there are millions like me who also feel as if they have missed the talent train and think that this is something to regret. In the past we have tried to console ourselves with the idea that we are, deep down, the different than the great and the good but really the same when all is said and done. I say that this happily misses the point.  

For in our world average is considered a bad word—an unspeakably bad one—perhaps among the very worst words in English. The merest whiff of it quashes the aspirations of anyone seeking a promotion, getting a shot at winning as a mate that person we find so mesmerizing, securing a place on the team, or trying to move ahead and do something new. Instead of honoring average for its esteemed place at the heart of life, we brand its forehead with a big red F. We flee from it and then lard up our language with words and phrases such as superb, superior, exemplary, outstanding, best, without equal, and a thousand others—anything to put distance between us and what we think is the purgatory of the average. 

Woah! This all sounds rather morose—a real buzz kill. After all, what’s to like about being average and who wants to settle for average when there might be something better just around the corner? Would you want to be treated by an average surgeon? Flown by an average pilot? Taught by an average teacher? Well…not if you could help it.

Not only that, but you might think that talk like this, especially from a middle-aged man, smacks of giving up, settling for the status quo, or pining for a lost youth and a chance to do it all over again. After all, aren’t we taught to seek excellence in all we do and that excellence is both the journey and the goal? Maybe you skipped the Olympics and thus were not awed into the same despondency as I was. Instead, even now, you are telling yourself that being average has a wiff of being “just satisfactory” or even of failure and you are having none of it. You might think that average is for “the other person” but certainly not yourself nor, for heaven’s sake, your children.

Well average doesn’t mean mediocre or just satisfactory or anything like that. Average, as we will see, is where life is wondrously lived. The reality is that 67% of the area under the Bell Curve is within a stone’s throw from the exact middle. Like gravity, average is an omnipresent fabric of our existence that has a 1000 shades of meaning. I assure you that it is not the poor sibling to stupendous, amazing, extraordinary and all those adjectives that praise the great but simultaneously, and not so subtly, damn and demean the average.

I am finding that average often reflects deep levels of competence, a delicious sense of fun, and a wondrously varied slice of humanity. Instead of fleeing or fearing average, we need to rally to its defense and embrace it for the insights that it offers into life.  

Another reason to give average its due is that is a safe haven—a place of peace and refuge. If you are like me, you have grown tired of having to hear about the above average and how good they are at everything. This message starts in elementary school and the pounding never ends. It is the most tormenting earworm possible. The above average peep out at us from every source of information and entertainment imaginable. These great and the good, whether they wish to or not, constantly remind us of their effortless superiority. They smother us with their achievements and, like a heavy blanket in warm weather, it wears us down and suffocates us. 

Fortunately there is an encouraging and growing resistance against this “smothering of superiority.” For example, an average person is always at his or her best. They can do no more—they are already giving it their all. The average need no cheering on, no push of extra effort, and no mapping out of a grand life strategy. Remember when your parents told you to do your very best? Well, that is exactly what the average are doing—all the time!

The good news is that average does not mean monotone or dreary—after all, plain vanilla is the most-ordered of any ice cream flavor and so, in an odd turn, what you assumed was just average is actually at the top of the popularity sweepstakes. Realize this and doubts about being average disappear as quickly as a morning fog in the new sun.

More good news is that average is the redoubt from which we can fight against the pretentiousness of the strivers and the over-achievers as they grind us down with their frequent selfish pursuits. From here we can fight the ultimately futile quest for perfection. We can fight letting great become the enemy of good, and we can fight what we are not nor ever will be. 

We average folk live in the sweet spot of human existence. The same sun that warms the great and the good warms us as well. The same beauty of the world is also there for us to see and share. Even better, we can actually be part of that beauty through our seemingly mundane tasks and chores of the every day.

And we can excel. We can excel at being average! How? Simply by taking all we do seriously but never ourselves. 

Let the gifted and talented streak across the sky in the blazes of glory that brighten their world. We have our own and there is plenty to savor in it—all right under the middle of the Bell Curve.

Keep being average!