NOTE from Phil: What follows is a fantastic article from Michael Neill, author of Supercoach, a book on my reading list for later this year. I’ve been reading Michael’s newsletters for years, so when this article was offered to me, I jumped at it. I hope you enjoy it!
I was once talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler when he said to me, “Have an average day!” Taken aback, I asked him what he meant. Isn’t the idea to have great days, or even exceptional ones?
In response, he told me a story about one of his teachers, Lyndon Duke, who studied the linguistics of suicide. Duke was hired to analyze suicide notes for linguistic clues that could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers. Through his research, he came to believe that the enemy of happiness is “the curse of exceptionality.” When everyone is trying to be exceptional, nearly everyone fails because the exceptional becomes commonplace, and those few who do succeed feel isolated and estranged from their peers. We’re left with a world in which a few people feel envied, misunderstood, and alone, while thousands of others feel like failures for not being “enough”—good enough, special enough, rich enough, or even happy enough.
This resonated deeply with my own experience. When I was in the midst of my own suicidal thoughts in college, I remember wishing I could run away from my Presidential scholarship and hide, perhaps changing my name to “Bob” and taking a job 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’d 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 and miserable? Absolutely.
One of Duke’s breakthroughs came when he was dealing with his own unhappiness and heard a neighbor singing while he was mowing his lawn. Duke realized what was missing from his life: the simple pleasures of an average day. The very next weekend, he went to visit his son, who was struggling to excel in his first term at university. “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 it did take the pressure off him to be quite so exceptional. A month later he phoned his father to apologize. He had gotten A’s on his exams, despite having done only an average amount of studying.
This is the paradoxical promise of an average-day philosophy: The cumulative effect of a series of average days is actually quite extraordinary.
If we put this together with another one of Duke’s discoveries—that the meaning of our lives comes from the differences we make with them, though these differences need not be huge to have a profound impact—we may well have the ultimate prescription for a happy, productive life:
Be an average, happy person making a small positive difference and having a happy, average day.
In doing this, you create a kind of exceptionality that everyone can share.
About the author: Michael Neill is an internationally renowned transformative coach and the author of the new book, SUPERCOACH: 10 Secrets To Transforming Anyone’s Life. For the past 20 years, he has been a coach, adviser, mentor, and creative spark plug to celebrities, CEOs, royalty and people who want to get more out of their lives. He hosts a weekly talk show on HayHouseRadio.com, and his daily and weekly coaching columns can be read on his website www.geniuscatalyst.com.
