Nobody dreams of being average. So why does almost everyone end up there?
Nobody dreams of being average. So why does almost everyone end up there?
Put a Five-Year-Old and a PhD in the Same Room
Give a group of five-year-olds a handful of marshmallows and some dry spaghetti. Tell them to build the tallest tower they can in eighteen minutes. Then do the exact same thing with a room full of adults holding graduate degrees.
The kids win. Not sometimes, consistently. Study after study shows it.
Not because they’re smarter. Because they haven’t been taught yet what “realistic” means. Nobody in that room has told them their idea is bad. Nobody’s laughed at a design before they’ve tried it. There’s no boardroom in their head running a cost-benefit analysis on looking foolish. They just build. Fall down. Build again. Faster the second time.
The adults, meanwhile, spend twelve of their eighteen minutes planning. Debating. Protecting themselves from getting it wrong in front of each other. By the time they finally start building, half the tower falls because nobody wanted to be the one who suggested the dumb idea that actually would have worked.
That’s not a marshmallow problem. That’s an average problem. And most of us are living inside it without ever agreeing to.
Average Isn’t a Description. It’s a Cage.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: average isn’t neutral. It’s not just “the middle of the pack.” It’s a category people fall into by default, not by decision, and once you’re in it, everything about it starts to feel normal. Average income. Average marriage. Average health. Average effort at a job you stopped caring about years ago.
Nobody sets out to have an average marriage. Nobody wakes up on their wedding day hoping for “good enough.” But roughly half of marriages end, and a huge share of the ones that survive are just surviving, two people sharing a mortgage and a last name, quietly settled into roommate status, mistaking the absence of divorce for the presence of a real relationship.
Nobody sets out for an average income either. But most people accept whatever number shows up on the paycheck as if it were handed down by fate instead of shaped by decisions they made, or didn’t make, years ago.
Average isn’t where people land because they aimed low. It’s where people land when they stop aiming at all.
The Statistics Aren’t Describing You
We’ve heard people say things like “well, most marriages end in divorce, so…” as if that’s a weather report instead of a warning. As if the average is a fact of nature rather than a track record of what happens by default.
Here’s what that framing conveniently leaves out: a statistic only holds for the people who never got a different input. It’s not a prophecy over your life. It’s a description of what tends to happen when nobody comes along to change the trajectory, no mentor, no honest confrontation, no model of something better close enough to actually learn from.
Change the inputs, and you change which category you fall into. That’s not motivational-poster talk. That’s just how patterns work. The people who end up outside the statistic aren’t genetically different. They just had somebody, or became somebody, willing to interrupt the pattern before it finished writing itself.
This Is Why We Wage War
We didn’t come up with “waging war on average” as a slogan to sound tough. We say it because we’ve watched what the alternative costs people, up close, over and over.
We’ve watched couples accept a version of marriage that looks fine from the outside and feels like two roommates on the inside because nobody ever told them that was optional to fix, not just tolerate. We’ve watched people cap their own income at whatever number felt “realistic,” never once questioning who decided that ceiling for them. We’ve watched people build an entire identity around not embarrassing themselves, which is just a polite way of saying they built an identity around staying small.
None of that is a character flaw. It’s what happens to almost anyone left unchallenged long enough. Average isn’t a personal failure, it’s the default setting for a life nobody has actively pushed back against.
That’s the whole fight. Not chasing extraordinary for the sake of a highlight reel. Refusing to let “that’s just how it usually goes” be the final word on a marriage, a bank account, a body, a business idea sitting untouched for the third year running.
You’ve Never Actually Chosen Average
If you’re honest, you already know the areas of your life running on autopilot. The relationship you’ve stopped fighting for. The number you’ve quietly accepted as your ceiling. The version of yourself you settled into somewhere around your late twenties and never revisited.
You didn’t choose that. It chose you, by default, because nobody interrupted it in time.
That’s the whole reason Remaking Champions exists. Not to hand out hustle quotes. To be the interruption. To be the mentor, the honest voice, the model close enough to actually change what the statistic would have predicted for you.
We don’t measure this in how big it gets. We measure it in the lives impacted. Individuals that break generational curses, and start building a foundation on truths that have been stress tested through time. The mindset and income ceiling that finally moved. The person who looked at the “norm” and decided it wasn’t going to be the story of their life.
You were never actually built for average. Most were never taught there was another option!
“Waging War on Average”
Jack & April Tu, Remaking Champions. Let’s go!!