Have an ‘average day‘.

When I was a schoolboy, between the ages of about 12 to 15, I struggled with many things.

My academic abilities, and subsequent grades, reflected my inability to focus. I was socially awkward. My passion for life was intensely low.

The more I struggled, the more I felt the disappointment of people close to me. And that disappointment only further fuelled my feelings of despair.

Many of the ambitions I had to be someone, or to achieve certain things with my life were quickly fading. I wasn’t a top performer. I wasn’t exceptional by any standard.

It got so bad, I made a conscious choice to let go of the idea of being exceptional. I laid down the burden. I disregarded any outside expectations. I accepted being ‘average’.

Funny things started to happen. I started passing exams, including those that I was failing not so long before. I may not have been making headlines with my academic genius, but I was able to choose the University I wanted to go to.

As I relaxed and embraced a life with less pressure, my personality came alive. Social conversations became easier and more gratifying. I enjoyed my life. I was excited for the future.

Looking back through my life, the times I have successfully embraced being an ‘average’ person, the more prolific and fun my life has been. My best results happen when I am less focused on achieving a notable outcome.

Be honest. You were shocked when you read the first line of this email. You were possibly thinking, “That must be a mistake.”

You’re reading this because you’re ambitious and you’re looking for inspiration. And, if you’re wired the same way as most other ambitious people, it’s likely you put way too much pressure on yourself to be exceptional.

Supposing you are one of the very few who regularly achieve exceptional results, you most likely feel lonely and terrified that you won’t be able to maintain the standards you have set. You might even secretly try to sabotage your success in an attempt to fit in.

For most of us who don’t achieve exceptional (by whatever standard we set), we invariably feel some kind of ‘not enough’: good enough, happy enough, wealthy enough, loveable enough.

In Michael Neil’s Supercoach he puts forward the idea of aiming for an average day.

His idea is based on the work of Dr Abraham Low – a psychotherapist in the 1930’s – who recognised that regardless of whatever unique skills his patients might have, they were human beings just like everyone else.

Dr Low called this the ‘average person’ approach and contrasted it with what he called ‘the curse of exceptionality.’

Years later Lyndon Duke came across Dr Low’s work when he was studying ‘the linguistics of suicide’, analysing suicide notes of teenagers.

A major breakthrough for Lyndon Duke came when he heard a neighbour singing while mowing the lawn. Despite the ‘exceptional work’ he was doing, he realised he was missing the simple pleasures in life.

Soon after, Lyndon sat down with his son and said to him, “I expect you to be a straight ‘C’ student. I want you to complete your unremarkable career, meet an ordinary young woman, and live a completely average life.”

A month later he called his father and apologised. He’d gotten ‘A’s in all his exams. But he’d achieved this by doing an average amount of studying.

This is the paradoxical nature of the ‘average person‘ or ‘average day‘ approach. The cumulative effect of many average days spent doing what you love, results in something unexpectedly extraordinary.

If you want to achieve extraordinary results without feeling intense pressure, try the following ‘average day‘ challenge:..

• Choose one are of your life or career where you have been pushing yourself way too hard to excel.
• Make a conscious choice to be ok with ‘ordinary’ or ‘average’ results in this discipline.
• Spend 1 hour every day focused on this discipline. No more.
• Commit to this for at least 12 months. Ideally much longer.
• Witness the exceptional and prolific results you achieve with this approach.

After one year, you will have dedicated about 200 hours to this discipline. After five years, you’ll be somewhere around 1,000 hours.

Imagine the prolific results you can achieve with that kind of commitment to being average.