HAVE AN AVERAGE DAY!
I was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler once when he said to me, “Have an average day!” A bit taken aback, I asked him what he meant. After all, isn’t the idea to have “great” days, or even “exceptional” ones?
He then told me the story of one of his mentors, a man named Lyndon Duke who studied something called “the linguistics of suicide”. After receiving a doctorate from two separate universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes to look for linguistic clues which could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers.
What he learned was startling - that the enemy of happiness was what he called “the curse of exceptionality”. In a world where everyone is trying to be exceptional, two things happen. The first is that nearly everyone fails, because by definition if too many people become exceptional, the exceptional becomes commonplace. The second is that those few who do succeed feel even more isolated and estranged from their peers than before.
Consequently you have a few people feeling envied, misunderstood and alone and tens of thousands of others feeling like failures for not being “enough” - “good enough”, “special enough”, “rich enough” or even “happy enough.”
And this is the paradoxical promise of the “average day” philosophy - the cumulative effect of a series of average days spent doing an average amount of what one loves and wants to do is actually quite extraordinary.
Let’s put this thought together with another one of Duke’s discoveries - that many of the young people he studied felt as though their lives had no meaning and made no difference to the world or anyone in it.
As a practical philosopher, he realized that the meaning of our lives actually comes from the differences we make with them. And that those differences need not be huge to be profound in their impact on both ourselves and others.
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