Todd Rose Quotes

Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago by two European scientists to solve the social problems of their era.

From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.

It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you're comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots - as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups - then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a doctor, the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee - the moment you need to make a decision about any individual - the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.

Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn't reflect your, or your child's, or your students', or your employees' abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.

I made my decision as an informed adult - so deliberately informed that I ended up taking a whole course in pharmacology at Harvard, where I wrote my term paper on the neural mechanisms of stimulants and their impact on cognition and behavior (and, incidentally, it's so boring you would need stimulants to read it).

You no longer need to fly a World War II aircraft in an age of jet fighters, and you no longer need to weigh yourself against a non-existent Norma.