Hey. Welcome back. Pull up a chair, grab whatever you’re drinking, and let’s talk about something that nobody puts on a vision board.
Being average.
I know. I know. You felt a little something just hearing that word, didn’t you? A small flinch, maybe your lips have pursed. Like someone said “mediocre” or “giving up.” Stick with me.
We live in a world that is absolutely deranged and obsessed with excellence and overachieving.
Your LinkedIn feed is a highlight reel of people disrupting industries at 24. Your Instagram is fitness models who “just eat intuitively.” Your podcast recommendations are all billionaires explaining how they only sleep four hours because they’ve “optimized their rest.”
And somewhere in the middle of all that, you’re sitting there trying to remember if you drank enough water today.
I want to tell you about my friend Sridhar. He is not extraordinary by any measurable standard. He’s not going to be on the cover of Forbes. He’s not building an app. He works a government job — nine to five, same desk for eleven years. He comes home, tends to this ridiculous little vegetable garden he’s obsessed with, cooks dinner for his family, and watches cricket and reruns that he’s already seen.
And here’s the thing — Sridhar is one of the happiest people I have ever met in my life.
Like, genuinely, quietly, annoyingly happy.
I used to feel a little sorry for him. I thought he lacked ambition. I thought he’d settled. And then one evening I’m sitting in his garden, eating tomatoes he’d grown himself, and he says to me — completely unbothered — “I like my life. I know you think I could have done better, but I like my life. Every part of it. Do you like yours?”
And I — the one with the goals and the self-improvement podcasts and the five-year plan — had absolutely nothing to say.
Sridhar wasn’t average because he’d failed to be exceptional. He was average because he’d chosen a life that fit him. And that, it turns out, is extraordinarily hard to do.
Here’s what nobody tells you: the pursuit of extraordinary is often just anxiety holding an iced coffee … inner peace yet to load.
We don’t chase greatness purely because we love growth. A lot of the time, we chase it because we’re terrified that if we stop — if we just are who we are — it won’t be enough. That we won’t be enough.
Average, in this culture, has become a moral failing. But think about what average actually means. It means you’re human. It means you’re in the middle of the bell curve — which is, by definition, where most of life happens. The greatest loves, the longest friendships, the Sunday mornings that feel like mercy — none of that shows up on a performance review.
The average parent who shows up every single day? That child will remember it forever.
The average friend who answers the phone at midnight? That call changes a life.
The average employee who does honest, decent work and goes home without burning out? That person is still here in ten years, which is more than you can say for a lot of hustle-culture heroes.
The writer Kurt Vonnegut (vaw-na-gut — brilliant, strange, worth reading) once said something that I think about more than I’d like to admit. He was at a party with his friend Joseph Heller, and someone pointed out that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from Catch-22 in its entire lifetime.
Heller turned to Vonnegut and said: “Yes, but I have something he will never have. Enough.”
Enough.
That word is so quiet. And so devastating. Because we are living in a culture that has declared war on “enough.” Enough has been rebranded as complacency. Contentment has been repackaged as a problem to be solved.
But Heller — who had written one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century — knew something the hedge fund manager might not. That the finish line of more doesn’t exist. And if you’re always running toward it, you never get to stand still and notice that you’re already somewhere worth being.
Now, I’m not saying don’t have dreams. Dream wildly. Work hard. Try things that scare you.
But I am saying this: let “average” breathe a little. Let it mean something other than failure.
Because the most radical thing you can do in a world screaming at you to optimize, scale, and outperform — is to look at your ordinary Tuesday, your unremarkable dinner, your small and quietly beautiful life, and say: this is enough. I am enough.
Sridhar figured that out with a tomato garden.
The rest of us are still working on it.
That’s it for today. If this hit something in you, share it with someone who needs permission to slow down. And if you’re a high achiever who absolutely hated this episode — I respect you. Go disrupt something.
I’ll be here. Being average. Talk soon.
