Todd Rose

“The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.”
― Todd Rose, The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

“It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you’re comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots—as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups—then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a doctor, the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee—the moment you need to make a decision about any individual—the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.”
― Todd Rose, The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness