If you design a cockpit based on the average pilot body, not a single pilot will fit in it. Just ask the US Air Force.
In 1950, they measured 4,063 pilots on over 140 dimensions. Then, they took just the top ten (like height, sleeve length, etc.), and designed a cockpit that’d fit anyone who lands in the middle 30% on each of those dimensions.
Unfortunately, no pilot did. In The End of Average, Todd Rose tells the story. Even when they reduced the number of dimensions to just three, less than 3.5% of all pilots would fit in the resulting cockpit. The conclusion? “There was no such thing as an average pilot.”
That’s the problem with average: It’s calculated, not real.
How long is an average blog post? Five minutes? Three? Seven? It doesn’t matter. “Long isn’t the problem. Boring is,” Seth says.
You don’t always talk for exactly one minute. Sometimes, you talk for five. Sometimes for 20. Why should writing be any different?
In 2017, my friend Sean asked for feedback on his writing. I gave an example of a writer who only ever published two-minute reads, and it didn’t seem to work. Sean has greatly expanded his repertoire. He’s trying new platforms, new formats, and I can see one-minute, three-minute, even seven-minute reads. Three years later, the other guy still publishes two-minute reads.
The number one pattern all writers must break is length.
For some reason, it’s particularly easy to settle into our own average when it comes to number of words. We have our little structure, our precious own style that we’ve painstakingly formed, and, for some reason, we’re unwilling to let it go — even when it doesn’t work.
There’s only so much you can play with when it comes to formatting, but a 500-word argument is entirely different from a 1,000-word article — and neither shows any relation to a 5,000-word manifesto.
This isn’t to say you should write more just to write more. But you shouldn’t write less just to stay average — both literally and figuratively. There’s no reason to put artificial limits on ourselves.
“Why make things shorter than necessary if you’re not paying for paper?”
“When there’s always something better and more urgent a click away, it’s tempting to go for shorter,” Seth says. But if you can tell every story you can think of in two minutes, that’s not an artificial limit. It’s a real one. You need to think more about those stories.
There is nothing new under the sun. Whatever you say will have already been said. The point of telling stories isn’t to have the first original idea in the history of mankind. It’s for the way you tell them to resonate with the readers of your time. If you’re lucky, by the time they’re done reading, they’ll feel slightly different than before.
Sparking this kind of change takes time, time you and your reader must spend together.
There are nine Star Wars movies. Not one. This isn’t to say one-off films or short blog posts can’t be any good. It’s to say one is more like a bullet — it either hits or it doesn’t — while the other is more like drinking a cup of tea.
Human identity isn’t a marble sculpture. It rarely happens that a piece just gets chipped away, and now, the whole thing is different forever. A traumatic event, a life-changing decision — sometimes, those do the trick. But a blog post? Hardly.
Our identity is more like a cocktail: It’s fluid. Its composition changes slowly. If you stir it, new things might bubble to the surface. But it takes time. So keep stirring. Keep having tea with your readers.
In 2017, you could look at my profile and see the following five reading times in a row: 8–6–3–12–2. Three years later, here’s another excerpt: 4–3–9–7–9.
I’m not the most successful writer, and I don’t have one topic I keep droning on about. This may have cost me many dollars and much expert status over the years, but I’ll happily leave both on the table if it means I get to be me.
Variety is the spice of life, they say. Humans are multi-dimensional, and just like your audience won’t expect you to play the same record over and over again, they also won’t mind how long each individual record is. Live a little. Play a short song, then a symphony. Write a poem, then a how-to. Long isn’t the problem — boring is.
Whatever you do, don’t be boring. And don’t get stuck in your own average.