I grew up believing one thing: Don’t be average.
Looking back now, as an older, slightly fatter man, there’s something wonderfully ironic about that particular piece of advice. While every person in authority was telling me not to become average, the systems around me were teaching me exactly how to become it.
School teaches us there was one right answer. Business teaches us there’s a right process. Algorithms tell us there’s a right format. Most industries have their own best practices, and society at large constantly reminds us that fitting in is safer than standing out.
None of these proven systems are bad. In fact, they’re incredibly useful. They help us educate millions of little people, build reliable businesses, and make sense of an increasingly complicated world.
But when you start stacking them on top of one another, year after year, decade after decade… something intriguing happens. They all pull us in the exact same direction:
- Toward what’s proven
- Toward what’s predictable
- Toward what’s familiar
- Toward the flipping middle
We hear a lot these days about falling test scores, declining creativity, and a lack of ambition. I’m not convinced that’s the whole story. I think we’re living inside an ecosystem of invisible forces that constantly reward the safest path. Millions of perfectly sensible decisions, made by perfectly sensible people, combine to suck us toward the same ideas until we all end up in the exact same place… the fookin’ middle.
I call this: the gravity of average.
Whether we realize it or not, we’ve been caught in its invisible pull since the day we were born … damn it.
Here are the five layers of gravity conspiring against us all, and why you need to fight them with everything you’ve got to protect your individual magic.
1. Educational gravity
Our first experience of this gravity starts in the classroom.
School has an incredibly difficult job: educating millions of children fairly and consistently, often with limited resources and enormous expectations. The only way to make that possible is to rely on standardized curricula, rigid grading schemes, and easily measured outcomes.
From a very young age, we learn to optimize for what gets rewarded … the gold stars, the praise from teachers, the good-old pats on the back. Before long, we’re no longer just learning the subject, we’re learning how to succeed within the system.
The educational environment doesn’t intentionally produce average people. Far from it. But when success is measured in the exact same way for everyone, it’s only natural that millions of children begin chasing the exact same things. The more people optimize for the identical outcome, the more they will eventually look alike… it’s the logical outcome of a predictable system.
2. Economic gravity
Businesses only exist if they survive, and to do that, they have to make rational decisions. If a pricing model has worked before, why change it? If a marketing strategy has proven successful, why reinvent it? If a competitor is growing using a particular approach, it’s only natural to copy it.
None of these are bad decisions.
Economist Harold Hotelling described this exact phenomenon in what became known as Hotelling’s Law. When businesses compete for the same customers, they naturally drift toward one another rather than away. Differentiation feels risky, while similarity feels sensible.
Over time, this way of thinking compounds. What starts as “best practice” gradually becomes the default way of doing business. When an entire industry chases the identical measures of success (revenue, profit, or market share), even the most original business ideas eventually drift toward the average when they optimize for the same thing.
3. Social gravity
As humans, we’ve always worried about belonging. For most of human history, being accepted by the group dramatically increased our chances of not becoming dead.
That instinct is still hardwired into us. One of my favourite psychology experiments that backs this up comes from Solomon Asch. Participants were invited into a room to complete what they thought was a simple test about the length of a few lines. What they didn’t know was that everyone else in the room was an actor hired to be in on the experiment.
The answers were obvious, but one by one, the actors deliberately gave the wrong answer. Faced with an entire room disagreeing with them, many participants ignored what they could clearly see and went along with the crowd instead. Around 75% of people conformed at least once, even though the group was clearly wrong.
Nobody has to tell us to fit in. We just learn which parts of ourselves earn acceptance and which parts are safer left hidden.
4. Algorithmic gravity
Welcome to the newest kid on the block. Algorithms don’t care about “silly” things like originality … all they give a poop about is retention.
The easiest way to predict what will keep your attention is to look at what has already worked. Successful ideas become recommendations. Recommendations become trends. Trends become the templates that every influencer and their dog starts copying. Before long, thousands of people are creating different versions of the exact same thing because that’s what the system keeps serving up.
Social media isn’t in the business of finding the next brilliant idea. It’s in the business of keeping us scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. And the easiest way to do that is by feeding us a slightly repackaged version of the average … the baseline of everything the system has already gobbled up before.
5. Professional gravity
Every profession develops its own “playbook.” Designers have processes, marketers have foolproof plans, and consultants have their frameworks. Most of these defaults exist because someone, at some point, solved a real problem for a real person … hurrah.
The danger happens when best practice subtly becomes the only practice. The longer an approach survives unquestioned, the more it feels like common sense. Before long, entire industries are repeating formulas that worked 30 years ago, even though the world has completely evolved around them. The comfort zone is a very dangerous place. Nothing grows there, as they say.
The optimization trap
What I’ve realized about these five forces is that they all share the exact same mischievous mechanism. Every system must decide what success looks like and, once it does, the rest of us naturally optimize for it.
- School rewards grades.
- Business rewards revenue.
- Algorithms reward engagement.
- Society rewards acceptance.
- Professions reward best practice.
None of the above are bad … but when millions of people chase the exact same measures of success, gravity takes over. Human beings are remarkably good at adapting to their environment. The more we align ourselves with the same definition of success, the more we begin to resemble one another.
And today, more people than ever are finding themselves in the middle.
For most of history, becoming competent at something took years of deliberate practice. Today, technology can get almost anyone to “good enough” in a matter of minutes.
Technology is closing the gap from below, while optimization is closing the gap from above. People who once struggled to produce competent work can now create something perfectly passable with better tools. At the same time, many of the people who were once exceptional are handing more of their thinking over to those same tools. In the pursuit of speed they often sacrifice the originality and personality that made them stand out in the first place.
One force lifts people into the middle. The other pulls people back towards it.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being average. Millions of people build fulfilling careers, do meaningful work, and live brilliant lives without ever trying to stand out.
But commercially, today, average is becoming a far riskier place to build a future.
To riff on something Rory Sutherland once said: when you become logical, you become predictable. And when you become predictable, you become replaceable.
That doesn’t mean you should reject logic or stop using new technology. It simply means those things are no longer enough. They help you meet the standard, yes, but they’ll never make you the obvious choice.
I’ve come to believe that opportunity doesn’t flow toward the middle. It flows toward recognizable differences that people trust.
The gravity of average never disappears.
You simply decide whether to drift with it … or spend your time pushing against it.
Maybe that’s what Mr. Hotelling was trying to tell us all along.
Test the edges.
Jersey Mike’s is aiming for a near-$8 billion listing, testing investors’ appetite for franchise-driven growth.
Shoko Kawata just became the first mayor in Japan’s history to stay in office while becoming a mother. She arranged for a deputy to cover her maternity leave, without resigning and without apologizing. That was enough to set off a national debate, complete with commentators who found it “inappropriate” for an elected official to step away from her duties for a few months. Kawata summed it up with disarming simplicity: Institutions could adapt, but people change far more slowly, and she cannot turn herself into a man.
Japan has a word for what she is up against: matahara, a contraction of “maternity harassment.” It covers everything done to pregnant employees and new mothers at work—pressure to resign, demotions upon return from leave, projects reassigned, managers who treat a pregnancy as a personal betrayal. The word is so widely used that it belongs to the everyday vocabulary of Japanese working life.
The Japanese have a real talent for coining words that stick, and workplace culture has given them plenty of material. There is karoshi, or death from overwork, officially recognized and compensated by the state since the 1980s. In the late 2010s, they coined the word KuToo to refer to the movement against mandatory high heels at work, a triple pun on kutsu (shoe), kutsū (pain), and #MeToo. When a phenomenon is common enough to deserve its own word, it says a lot about what’s expected from workers. Give us your life. Be a pretty employee or else . . . and choose between your job and a child.
There’s a paradox. Japan desperately needs children. In 2025, its fertility rate fell to 1.14 children per woman, a historic low and the 10th consecutive year of decline. In Tokyo, the rate has dropped below one child per woman. Deaths have outnumbered births for 19 straight years. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi calls it a “silent emergency.” Yet women’s labor force participation still follows the same curve it has for decades: It climbs after graduation, then collapses at marriage or first birth. A country with a vital need for babies keeps structurally punishing the women who have them.
Americans might be tempted to read this as an exotic story about a faraway work culture. They shouldn’t.
America’s fertility rate is falling too, and mothers are being pushed out of work
The U.S. general fertility rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women of reproductive age in 2025, another record low, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate has declined 23% since 2007. The total fertility rate now sits below 1.6 children per woman, far under the 2.1 needed for population stability. About 3.6 million babies were born last year, and immigration restrictions mean there is less demographic slack to compensate.
Meanwhile, American mothers are leaving the workforce at a pace not seen in decades. More than 400,000 women exited the U.S. labor force in the first half of 2025, according to a University of Kansas analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the steepest decline in over 40 years for mothers of young children. Labor force participation among mothers with children younger than 5 fell nearly 3 percentage points between January and June 2025. A KPMG analysis found the sharpest drop among college-educated mothers of very young children, whose participation slid from close to 80% in 2023 to about 77%. Fathers’ participation rose slightly over the same period.
In all likelihood, childcare is the main driver. Already scarce, it is getting scarcer. The average price of care reached $13,184 per year in 2025, and 46% of American children under 6 live in a licensed childcare desert. Meanwhile, immigration raids have shrunk the workforce, Head Start funding is flat despite inflation, and the July 2025 budget legislation cuts deeply into Medicaid, which covers about 40% of U.S. births.
Return-to-office mandates did the rest: The share of Fortune 500 companies requiring full-time office attendance nearly doubled in 2025, from 13% to 24%. The pandemic-era flexibility that had pushed women’s labor force participation to record highs in 2023 has been methodically dismantled, and mothers absorbed the shock.
The earnings consequences are well documented. In their landmark cross-country study of child penalties, economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and their coauthors found that American mothers lose roughly 30% of their earnings in the long run after a first birth, while fathers lose essentially nothing. That penalty compounds over a career, into lower savings, lower Social Security benefits, and a wider gender gap at every subsequent stage.
Medals will not produce babies
Against this alarming backdrop, the administration’s answer has been rhetoric. President Trump has called himself the “fertilization president.” Congress created $1,000 “Trump Accounts” for newborns; a $5,000 baby bonus has been floated, along with a proposed National Medal of Motherhood for women with six or more children. At the White House, a wave of high-profile pregnancies among senior figures has been presented as proof of a family-friendly administration. Katie Miller declared that the most radical thing a woman can do is embrace her “biological destiny.”
The message behind all this is clear: Women should stay home and have children. The problem is that this model has already been tested, and it fails. Cash bonuses and honorary medals have a poor track record everywhere they have substituted for infrastructure. The demographic evidence points in the opposite direction: The countries that resist fertility decline best are those where women can combine careers and children without penalty. France long illustrated this relative advantage over Japan and Germany, where the motherhood penalty reaches 62% of lost earnings and two-thirds of mothers work part-time. And indeed, U.S. federal statistics show the pronatalist push has not moved the needle: Fertility hit a new historic low in 2025.
Japan spent three decades proving that a country cannot harass its mothers into having more babies. It even gave us the vocabulary. A nation that wants children must first accept that mothers must be allowed to remain full workers, with professional ambition and full incomes. The fact that one mayor taking maternity leave still makes national news, in Japan or anywhere else, is a measure of how far we have to go.
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After joining Amazon as a product leader in 2022, I saw a series of layoffs and return-to-office mandates over the following three years that made any semblance of presence in home life impossible. The tech industry layoffs disproportionately impacted women, and the workers that remained struggled in a workplace with lowered morale and increased expectations.
Then I stumbled upon the entrepreneurship through acquisition space. The ETA premise is simple: Rather than founding a company from scratch or climbing someone else’s ladder, you buy an existing, profitable business.
I spent the last year of my Amazon tenure searching for my first business to purchase, with a vision for a holding company that included incubated and acquired companies. In June 2025, with the help of a Small Business Administration (SBA) acquisition loan, I bought DiggyPOD, a $10 million book printing business founded in 1988. This May, I added Long Overdue Books, a vibrant book publisher with several notable titles, to my acquisition portfolio. I’m expanding these businesses into a global media organization supporting content creators.
I have dedicated the last year to empowering other tech industry veterans to purchase businesses. Here are my three reasons why this is a compelling option for this demographic:
1. Uniquely favorable financing and odds
The SBA offers acquisition financing on terms unmatched by the open market. This mechanism put my $10 million DiggyPOD acquisition within reach on a structure built around a monthly payment I could live with. Potential acquirers should know that this financing comes with a personal guarantee, but the due diligence process required by the lenders and the SBA gives these deals a better chance than bootstrapped or venture-backed businesses. Acquisitions are dramatically safer than startups. A Yale School of Management study found that between 2019 and 2023, SBA business-acquisition loans defaulted at just 1.22%, versus the 50% of tech businesses that fail in their first five years.
2. Your corporate skills are the asset
The week after I purchased DiggyPOD, our million-dollar inkjet color printer, the crown jewel of the shop, broke down. I had no idea how to fix it, but I didn’t need to. Fortunately, I inherited a team with a combined 100-plus years of print experience who run production. My years of hiring technical talent enabled me to ask enough questions to ask the right ones, and understand the manufacturer service agreements. I brought the skills that a career in tech trains us for relentlessly: customer discovery, team leadership, and AI fluency. That operator muscle that feels generic inside a startup or in big tech is the core competency for running an acquired business. After running DiggyPOD for a year, I have revamped the tech stack completely for growth; installed a tech-forward executive team, including a Head of AI); and continuously, programmatically ensured customer success.
3. The honest case for your life
I will not pretend the transition was easy. In the early months, with a complex manufacturing operation to learn, and a team in Michigan to win over, I saw my kids less, not more. But buying into established cash flow is a fundamentally different proposition than chasing it. A startup founder spends years racing the runway, hoping revenue arrives before the money runs out. I bought into a profitable business, which means the question is no longer, “Will this survive?” but, “How do I want to grow it?”
When I joined Amazon, I set three nonnegotiables as a parent: I would be there when my kids woke up, there when they got home from school, and there to put them to bed. The tech industry made those impossible to honor. Ownership is the only structure I found that lets me build that life on my own terms. The path is not without risk, and it demands real work before the freedom arrives. But for tech veterans staring at another layoff cycle or return-to-office mandate, I want to be the voice that says there is another option.
I took it, and you can too.
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