Article By Kevin L. DeWitt

Are You Average?  Is your company average?  Are you an average person doing an above-average job for an average company selling an average product to the average consumer?

Average made America great. Average was the mass market, the sweet spot, the high-volume, high-profit, churn-’em-out-and-move-on middle.

Unfortunately … average does not exist anymore in America.  America’s best-selling beer isn’t Budweiser or Miller. It’s “other.”  Salsa now outsells ketchup.  There are so many alternatives, so many distribution channels, so many choices and so many different kinds of consumers that average just isn’t interesting anymore.

Change is our new normal … our new “average.” 

During times of exceptional change, animals with the greatest chance to survive are the outliers … the super-fast cheetah or the mammoth with the extra-thick wooly coat.  Of course, being an outlier is risky.  If the world gets warm fast, that mammoth will be awfully unhappy …

All our lives we’ve been trained to keep our heads down, fit in, stick with it, and be quiet.  Be average. And in stable times, that’s a fine - though boring - strategy.

But now the rules have changed. Anything could happen; instability is a constant.  And the best strategy is not to hunker down and fit in … the best strategy is to stand up and stand out.

How can you make your company’s products more exceptional?  How can you take astounding risks with your career?

We can’t have it both ways.  We cannot be invisible and stand out…

If we’re invisible, one thing is certain: We’re going to become extinct.  Maybe not instantly and maybe not violently like the mammoth … but where change is the new normal … there’s less and less room for someone who doesn’t make a difference.

It’s something to think about…

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
-Ellen Goodman

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