Just wanted to recommend this wonderful tip from Michael Neill that looks set to go viral and become an event in its own right
Happy reading
Take the day off from striving and struggling for success – and have a wonderfully average day instead…
“Happiness and a meaningful life come from making differences. But this is the most important rule to follow: always make the differences you can make, not the differences you would prefer to make but can’t.” – Lyndon Duke
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.”
When I was in the midst of the thickest cloud of my own suicidal thoughts at university, I remember wishing I could run away from my Presidential Scholarship and hide, perhaps changing my name to “Bob” and taking a job at pumping gas at a full-service station somewhere in the midwest. Only in my fantasy, sooner or later people would start to notice that there was something special about me. They would begin driving miles out of their way to have their cars filled up by “Bob the service guy” and exchange a few words with him, leaving the station oddly uplifted and with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose.
Before long, someone would discover how exceptional I was and I would have to run away from their expectations all over again. I was, to my way of thinking, doomed to succeed.
Delusions of grandeur? Quite possibly. Depressed, hopeless and miserable? Absolutely!
One of Lyndon Duke’s major breakthroughs came when he was dealing with his own unhappiness and heard the sound of a neighbor singing while mowing his lawn. He realized then that’s what was missing from his life – the simple pleasures of an average life.
The very next weekend, he went to visit his son who was struggling to excel in his first term at university. He sat him down and told him about his revised expectations for him:
“I expect you to be a straight “C” student, young man,” Duke said. “I want you to complete your unremarkable academic career, meet an ordinary young woman and if you choose to, get married and live a completely average life!”
His son, of course, thought Dad had finally flipped, but did take the pressure off himself to be quite so “exceptional”. A month later he phoned his father to apologize. He had gotten “A”s on all his exams, but it was OK because he had only done an “average” amount of studying.
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.
When we combine those two ideas we have what may well be the ultimate goal for a happy and productive life:
To be an average, happy person making a bit of a positive difference
and having a happy, average day.
In doing this, you create the kind of “exceptionality” that can be shared by everyone.
Have fun, learn heaps, and have an average day!
This tip is from Michael Neill please check out his new website dedicated to having an average day here.
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