What you need to know about the power of viewing yourself as below average.

What it means to embrace being a mortal human being, the power of simplicity and consistency in everyday life, and much more.

Thanks for listening. My name’s Andrew.

I record strange, fun things and try to make sense of this weird, beautiful life. You can find more of my written work at my blog. I’m just here, taking notes as I go, trying to figure out what it all means.

Alright, this is podcast number 2 and my name is Andrew let’s get this going. So something I have been thinking about a lot lately. It’s a quote I heard a while back from Derek Sivers. 

So he was being interviewed by Tim Ferriss back in the day and he ended the interview with a string of different things that he believed to be true. It was all very silly, cinematic and music was playing in the background. 

But he said something that has stuck with me to this day. 

He mentioned that he deliberately will cultivate the belief that he is below average. And I don’t know why that has stuck with me for so long, but it has. It’s something that I think more and more I actually do believe about myself. And so I want to pick that apart a little bit and kind of share with you why I think that’s important and how it’s helped me in my life. 

So if you’ve never listened to this, you haven’t listened to the first one. My name is Andrew. I currently am in management in a restaurant, busy steakhouse. I’m a level two certified sommelier working on my level three. I started my career in hospitality off as a bartender. And now I’m transitioning to management and I’m trying to figure out what all it means. 

And I’m trying to figure out if I can kind of square the circle of working in an industry that is dependent on transient and what’s the right word for it. I guess uncommitted labor. 

And I’m not saying this pointing the finger outwards, but personally I definitely was known to not work the hardest and slack off in my youth. 

So yeah, I’m trying to figure out if I can work in this industry and still fulfill my potential, still be happy. 

So that’s part of the reason I’ve started doing these podcasts. And I don’t know honestly. I’m going to continue to just do them until I, if nothing else, get a little bit better and stop saying, uh, and ah. And hopefully learn a little bit and find a way to express these internal dilemmas and internal struggles that I am having. 

So let’s go back Derek Sippers below average. So this resonates with me because I actually think that I am this way too. I think that in most things that I believe that I’m actually not as good as sometimes I am. I guess that that is a sort of personal self-reflective glass half empty pessimistic view of the world. But that’s what I do.

I do think paradoxically that thinking this way does actually allow me in some things to be or end up better than average. I guess another way of kind of playing around with this idea: I feel like most people in the world think that they’re special and I definitely do not. 

A lot of people interact with the world and deal with the risks and challenges of the world like they are better than just the common pitfalls and mistakes that people commonly make. And that’s usually what trips people up. 

I forget if it was Munger or Warren Buffett that said something to the effect of, you know, our careers haven’t been in being brilliant. It’s been in avoiding massive stupidity. Nassim Talib always talks about the risks that will blow up and take you out of the game. Those are the ones that you need to avoid at all costs. It’s the existential risks. You can deal with other risks. You can deal with losses and setbacks. But the ones that take you out of the game, those are the ones you have to take care of. Those are the ones you have to be serious about. Those are the ones that you have to pay special attention to. Here’s a really good example.

I think it’s Chris Williamson that said, you know, you can live your whole life, eat right, exercise, take great care of yourself. And then one day you ride in a truck and you don’t wear your seatbelt. Just like that, game over. So pulling it back, special me. Why don’t I think that I am special?

I don’t know.

I just feel like I’m so banal to say everyone’s special and unique. Isn’t it? Personally, I think that all things considered, I’m pretty average in most of the things I do. Like all people, I have a couple areas where I’m an outlier. 

I enjoy reading more than most. 

I actually struggle at understanding and interacting in social environments more than most. 

I feel like I have a propensity to enjoy work more than some, not always to my benefit. 

But other than that, I wake up, I eat three meals a day. I stress about money. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep at night. 

The things that you are an outlier on are the things that are unique to you. Without those, yes, you would have nothing that’s unique about you. But other than those few things, all of us altogether, we are all a lot more alike than any one of us might want to admit to. So yeah. What else am I thinking about in relation to this? 

You know, there are a lot of benefits in thinking you are not special. 

One of the primary ones, at least from my point of view, is that if you do not think that you are special, you will actually heed warnings and pay attention when people try to let you know that there are pitfalls coming up. It is very easy to fall into the same traps that other people have fallen into in the past. We all like to pay lip service to the idea that we’ve learned from the mistakes of others, but it is a lot easier to say that than it is to do that. 

Some of the few things that I live my life by are the things that you hear from everyone: Try and get enough sleep. When you’re eating food, try and eat whole foods. Don’t eat too much. Try and stay away from sweets. Try and not smoke all the time. Try and not drink all the time. You know, do something that is good for your soul every day. Express gratitude. Be present. 

And even as I go through that list, as simple and stupid and banal as all those things are, as I’m going through that list, I’m thinking of instances where I’ve messed up on them. Because we are all human and it is so easy to make mistakes. 

If you can stop from adding complexity, if you can quite simply do the basics and do them brilliantly and do them brilliantly, there’s no end to what you can do. But it’s people that think that they’re more clever than they are and try to add complexity and that’s where problems happen. 

Right now in my life, it’s March 2025. I am reading Oliver Burkeman Meditations for Mortals. It’s a really good book. He’s the guy who wrote 4,000 Weeks’ Time Management for Mortals. And some of his main points are you never get everything done. 

The human predicament is that there are so many cool and interesting things you can do that you’ll never actually get through it all. And at some point, you do have to decide, just sit down, cut off an alternative route, pick one thing, stick to it, and give it your all. He talks about the absurdity of thinking that you could ever, for instance, read all the articles that you’re interested in or actually do all the things that you want to do. There is a fundamental limit to what a mortal human being can do. 

And interestingly, because he talks about these limits and accepting your place and what you can and can’t do, there’s actually a really freeing nature to it. It allows you to just all the things that you care about to start and to accept that, yes, I’m going to be imperfect. I am going to make mistakes. This podcast recording is an excellent example. I am doing my best to fight my perfectionist tendencies while also trying to give at least a semi-decent product in the end. I do not, as of yet, have the raw abilities or natural talent to come out the gate and be brilliant on a podcast. By myself, even though I did type up some notes and some bullet points, because I do still have mental tics, I have been practicing speeches. I have actually been having a lot of fun practicing speeches. 

I got a book about diction and I’m learning to correct a few of the tics I’ve noticed in my speech. I will undoubtedly have pauses like that. I am, yeah, I’m starting off imperfectly. I am taking the first baby steps to try and see if I can do this thing. Who knows? In five years, I may look back and say, oh my God, I cannot believe I posted that and I have grown so much and I am ashamed, but I do not think so. I know that every person who does something starts somewhere. 

It’s a constant refrain that I have to tell myself. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be successful, rich. You don’t have to do any of this stuff. You do have to be you. You do have to accept at some point that you are a mortal human being, that your life is flowing by, that you do not get to split test your life. You do not get to go back. You do not get to see if the decisions that you have made were the right ones. 

But at a certain point, you do have to open the app. You do have to sit in your room with your Apple AirPods and start talking. And you do have to see if, even in the strangest moment where you were talking alone to yourself in your room with your cat going by, can you take the first baby steps towards something that you think you could care about? 

So there you go. One thing I do want to talk about too, the Dunning Kruger effect. And I’m sure that some of you will know what that is. Essentially it is this effect where, as far as I understand, people think before they’ve tried a thing that they’ll be much better at a thing than they end up being. 

Essentially novices, beginners, believe that complex tasks are easier to do when looking from the outside than when they get into it and realize, oh, this is a whole thing. It’s weird because this also exists somewhere in the realm with crippling self-doubt that some people have. 

So you have all these people thinking, oh, that’s easy. I could do that. 

And also in the back of their minds being so afraid of failure that they never actually try something. Why did I bring that up? Well, I may just be talking to an empty room right now, hoping someone someday does listen to this. But that combination of crippling self-doubt and belief that this is easy and I should be able to do it, that is what is true for me right now. That’s what’s really been sticking with me over the last couple days as I’ve recorded a couple of these podcasts and deleted them. 

It’s a weird place to be in. But here I am. A funny thing is, you know, everyone does believe somewhere deep down that they are better than average. There’s this funny statistic that always gets passed around the internet and podcasts. 

I think it’s Belgium drivers, maybe drivers in the Netherlands. But one of those, they did a survey and 90% of the respondents said that they believed themselves to be better than average as a driver, which obviously can’t be true statistically. 

50% need to be worse and 50% need to be better. And just right in the middle is average. But that is I, and that’s who we are. 

And you know, on that subject, it is so funny thinking about the human mind. I’m not yet sure how I’m going to structure these podcasts. I’m sure many of them are going to be stream of consciousness. Sorry. I have also been thinking that I might review some books. 

One that I was thinking about reviewing was Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True. Really fascinating book. There’s, I can’t believe, like I can’t remember if it’s in his book. I’ve read about it and heard about it from several different sources. 

If you’ve never heard the term confabulation, it’s wild. And essentially, what happened, so the treatment for some serious epilepsy, the treatment for serious epilepsy back in the day, used to be severing of the two sides of the brain to where they wouldn’t talk to each other anymore. So essentially, you have a person who would appear normal and they’d have a left and right hemisphere, which in every normal functioning human brain does communicate. 

They set up these experiments to where they would give a message to just one side of the hemisphere. So for instance, block the eyesight from the left to right and put a written message that says raise your hand or something like that. And the participants would raise their hand. They would make sure that they were communicating this message only to one side of the brain that didn’t control spoken words. And then they would ask the recipient or the participant, you know, why’d you do that? And they would often say, oh, you know, I just felt like raising it or, you know, anything that they asked the subject to do, they would always be some sort of explanation. 

That’s that wild. 

And it makes you wonder how much of what you think and how much of your world is actually the thing that you’re thinking and how much of it is the mind’s quick automatic fill in the blank post rationalization. Yeah. Yeah, that is that is cool too. Something I think about a lot. I think that someone actually said this. 

I don’t know if the quote is attributable to anyone, but there are two reasons that we always do everything the logical reason and then the real reason. And yeah, that’s the real thing. You know, I don’t think that we understand our minds. I do want to see what I can do about that for me. I would love to do something like talking through thinking fast and slow. That’s a fantastic book about mental fallacies. I do think there’s, you know, a lot of really cool insights in the books, the elephant in the brain. I definitely would love to talk about that book at some point. So yeah, I think that that’s a good start for now. So we will see how this podcast progresses. The initial plan for this podcast is to do two podcasts a week. 

Hopefully I can keep that schedule up Tuesday, Thursday. Let’s see what happens. So yeah, for everyone who stayed with me until here, thank you. I know that this wasn’t the most polished one. I will get better. I promise you. I am still trying to figure out how to exactly prepare for these. And I’m pretty sure that if you just give me some time, give me a month. I’ll get in it. Give me a year. 

I’ll get good.

Give me a decade. Look out. So yeah, my name is Andrew. This is serves you right. And this is my podcast trying to figure out who I am and what I’m doing. Thanks. Thanks.