1. Most of us are average; and mostly, average works.
2. We rarely need the world's best dentist, plumber or accountant.
3. The psychologist Herbert Simon called this tendency 'satisficing'.
4. We usually choose good enough, rather than the absolute best.
5. Yet some parts of the economy work in precisely the opposite way.
6. They shatter the traditional rule that rewards should grow proportionally with ability.
7. From sport, film and music to business, tiny advantages can produce enormous rewards.
8. The economist Sherwin Rosen called this phenomenon the 'superstar effect'.
9. It explains how small differences in talent can create huge differences in earnings.
10. Technology amplifies this by allowing one exceptional performer to serve millions.
11. Before sound recording, the best singer could only perform to one room at a time.
12. Afterwards, through mass reproduction, the best singer could suddenly perform to everyone.
13. These are 'fat-tailed' worlds, where a few extreme successes can outweigh everything average.
14. Nassim Taleb argues that economics works this way, with rare events having disproportionate consequences.
15. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers adds a caveat: success isn't just talent, but opportunity, timing and luck.
16. Outliers aren't necessarily born exceptional; circumstances can turn small advantages into extraordinary ones.
17. Nor does exceptional mean being the best at one thing; rarity can come from unusual combinations of abilities.
18. Rory Sutherland offers a useful hack: being very good at two things can be better than being the best at one.
19. It's the polymath advantage, embodied by Leonardo da Vinci across art, anatomy, engineering, poetry and science.
20. As technology changes the nature of work, the economic value of ordinary competence may itself be changing.
21. David Autor shows how globalisation and automation have steadily hollowed out routine, middle-skill jobs.
22. AI could accelerate this, making competent writing, coding, analysis and creativity available to almost everyone.
23. This creates a paradox: when everyone becomes more capable, average capability becomes less valuable.
23. Yet being an outlier is risky; for every exceptional success, countless exceptional failures go unnoticed.
25. Society rewards conformity for good reason, while markets disproportionately reward successful deviation.
26. Venture capital makes this wager explicitly, tolerating many failures because one extreme success can repay all.
27. Evolution does the same, preserving variation as nobody knows which odd trait the next environment will favour.
28. A disadvantage in one environment can become an extraordinary advantage when the environment changes.
29. The trouble is that nobody knows in advance which deviation the next environment will reward.
30. So society has good reason to favour the average, even if evolution has good reason to preserve the exceptions.
31. As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane put it, 'The progress of evolution depends on the survival of deviant individuals.'