The Average Trap

Average isn’t good enough anymore.

The Average Trap is where you end up when you try just enough. It’s a place you can hide from your potential, an excuse never to really stretch yourself. And maybe, if you’re honest, it’s also part of why you’ve never quite got what you really want.

In a world where everyone seems to want more than everyone else, average has quietly become the new failing.

The Paradox of Average

The paradox is straightforward. You may want more than average, but you aren’t always willing to put in more than average. And those two things are fundamentally incompatible.

It’s easy to aim for average. You can stay hidden in the crowd. You can do just enough, and average excuses are readily accepted by the average person. Our education systems are largely designed to bring the failing up to average, because average and no more is what’s generally expected, and throughout society, there’s an entire infrastructure built around keeping you comfortably in the middle.

Aim for average, and with an average amount of effort, average is exactly what you’ll get. Research on goal-setting shows that people who set minimal or middling goals consistently underperform their potential by significant margins (Locke and Latham, 2002). When you aim low, you land low. Every time.

The Reality of Average

The trouble is that the average is not always what you actually want from life. And being in the average group isn’t always the safe, comfortable place it feels like.

As of the early 2020s, the average British person carries about £59,000 in debt, including their mortgage. They earn an average of £39,039 if in full-time employment. If you’re on the fortunate side of the average line, you can expect an average life expectancy of around 81 years. The UK’s fertility rate has been falling for some time and now sits at around 1.4 children per woman, well below what it was a generation or two ago. Only 42% of working-age people have any higher education, which technically puts those who do above average — and if you went further and got a degree specifically (a narrower measure than “any higher education”), you’re in the 33% who managed that, though you’re also likely carrying an average student loan of £50,800, which hangs around your neck until you’re earning enough of the average income to begin paying it back.

I’m not writing this to mock the average person. I’m writing it to show you what the numbers actually look like, because most people have never stopped to examine the life that being average statistically delivers. Studies on income distribution and social mobility (using US data, though the pattern holds in the UK too) show that what counted as a comfortable average for your grandparents is now a precarious one (Chetty et al., 2017). The benchmark moved, the bar has risen, and most people didn’t notice.

The Fallacy of the Law of Averages

Here’s where people get confused. There’s a widespread belief in something called the Law of Averages, the vague sense that things will balance out, that your turn is coming, that the statistics will eventually work in your favour. This belief is fictitious.

It also rests on a mix-up worth clearing up properly, because it’s the same mix-up running through most of this piece. There are two different things people mean by “average.” The median is the true midpoint: line everyone up in order, and exactly as many people sit above the median as below it. The mean — what we usually mean when we say “average income” or “average debt” — is a different creature entirely. It’s pulled upward by whoever sits at the top of the distribution, so for anything with a long tail of high achievers, income, wealth, debt, the mean sits above where most people actually are. More than half the population can be, and usually is, below the mean.

That’s not a comforting correction. It’s a worse one. You don’t get to assume you’ll land on the right side of the average line just because that’s what you want, and for the things that matter most, the average line itself is already pulled out of reach of most people before you even start.

The world isn’t fair. Some people are dealt a well-below-average hand and will have to work extraordinarily hard just to reach the middle. Others are born with real advantages and squander them by hiding safely in the norm. Neither outcome is random, and neither is inevitable. Research on the gambler’s fallacy shows that people fundamentally misunderstand probability, wrongly believing that statistical averages will naturally apply to them as individuals (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). They won’t. Not automatically.

Why Average Isn’t Safe

When life gets harder, average may not be safe. For two reasons.

The first is simple. Natural competition favours those who perform above the norm.

Remember the story of the two men camping in the woods when a bear comes out of the forest and growls. One of them immediately starts lacing up his running shoes.

“What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear,” says the other.

“I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”

Sometimes you simply need to be better than those around you, or just better than average. When resources are scarce, when jobs are competitive, when opportunities are limited, the average person gets left behind first. It’s not cruel. It’s just how competition works.

The second reason is that hiding in a crowd of ordinary, average people doesn’t make you stand out. It makes you invisible. Diversity and differentiation give people a natural advantage, and all you get from doing the average expected thing is the average expected result. Studies on competitive advantage show that differentiation, not conformity, drives success in saturated markets (Porter, 1985).

Average is where you go to disappear. Not to succeed.

The Average Day

Try living an average day. Get up after sleeping seven to nine hours. Eat an average breakfast of high-sugar cereal during the week or a fry-up at weekends. Don’t worry about exercise — the UK guideline is 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, and current data suggests roughly two-thirds of adults actually meet it. So skipping it doesn’t even put you in average company; it puts you in the minority who fall short.

Settle in and watch your average of 3 or more hours of TV. That’s the average. That’s what most people do, most days, most of their lives. And it adds up to a very particular kind of life. Research on habit formation and achievement shows that daily routines predict long-term outcomes more reliably than almost any other single factor (Clear, 2018). Your average day isn’t a neutral starting point. It’s actively creating your average life.

The Maths of Average

After looking at all of this, the maths of “average” isn’t especially comforting. Aim for average income, average wealth or average savings, and you’re not aiming at the midpoint. You’re aiming at a figure pulled upward by the people at the top, one that most people never actually reach. That’s a harder target than it sounds, not an easier one.

The average person looks for safety, not freedom. But there isn’t much safety in average anymore. A steady average salary is no real guarantee of anything. An average interview performance won’t even get you the average job, because you still need to be better than the other candidates competing for it. You need to be above average just to reach average outcomes.

And average now isn’t what average was. A few generations ago, an average person worked hard in a reasonably secure job and had enough for a decent retirement. Now jobs are less secure. People are saving less. Average life expectancy is declining in some demographics. So-so can lead to oh-no faster than most people expect. Studies on economic security confirm that the middle class is shrinking across developed nations, with average no longer guaranteeing the stability it once did (Pew Research Center, 2015 — again, drawn from US data, though the wider trend shows up in the UK too). The safety net has holes. Large ones.

Getting Above the Line

If you’re reading this, perhaps you want to be better, to get better, to have better things, or simply to have more than the average person. Some people want to go further still. They want to go from good to great. They want to stand up, stand out, and be genuinely excellent at what they do.

I know where the average line is. I know why people fall below it and what it actually takes to get above it. The line isn’t mysterious. What’s required isn’t secret. But it does require more than average effort, more than average honesty with yourself, and more than average willingness to do things differently from most of the people around you.

Research on excellence shows that top performers in any field share one characteristic: they refuse to accept average performance from themselves (Ericsson and Pool, 2016). They don’t aim for the middle. They aim above it consistently, over time, even when it’s inconvenient and nobody’s watching.

The Time Factor

Earnings, on average, tend to peak in a person’s mid-to-late forties before beginning to plateau. If you want to make a real difference to your trajectory, the time to act is now, not when conditions are more convenient, not when you feel more ready, because the clock is ticking.

If you want things to change, you’ll need to put in more than an average amount of effort to achieve better-than-average goals. That means working longer on the right things, studying harder, thinking more carefully, and being willing to take more considered risks than the average person around you. Studies on achievement trajectories show that consistent above-average effort compounds over time, creating substantially better outcomes than occasional bursts of exceptional work (Duckworth, 2016). It’s not glamorous. It’s just how it works.

What You Need to Do

Stop aiming for average. Stop hiding in the middle. Stop accepting that good enough is actually good enough, because in most situations, for most goals, it isn’t.

The Law of Averages is a fiction. If you think your life is going to improve just because it’s been difficult lately, think again. That’s not how probability works. It’s going to take deliberate extra effort. And if you think being average is genuinely safe, look around you: on income, wealth and savings, most people are already behind the average, not just half of them.

You want above-average results? Put in above-average effort. You want exceptional outcomes? Do exceptional work. The maths is simple. The execution is hard. But the alternative is staying precisely where you are.

Average is a trap. Don’t fall into it.

Further reading

• Office for National Statistics (2023). Average household income, UK: financial year ending 2022.
• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
• Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
• Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.