You Are Not Average. Your Finances Should Not Be Either.
In the early 1950s, the United States Air Force had a serious problem.
Pilots kept crashing. Not because of enemy fire. Not because of mechanical failure. Just crashing, under normal conditions, in ways that made no sense. It was stumping everyone. Then on one single day, 17 pilots died in separate accidents.
That was the breaking point.
The Air Force needed answers. They eventually landed on a theory. The cockpits were designed using body measurement data from 1926, nearly 30 years old. Pilots had gotten bigger and the cockpit had not kept up. The solution seemed obvious. Go measure the current pilots and design the cockpit around the average of what you find.
So in 1950, researchers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio measured 4,063 pilots across 140 physical dimensions. Everything you would expect, height, weight, chest circumference, arm length, leg length, shoulder width. And things you would not expect, thumb length, the distance from each pilot's eye to his ear, crotch height. They built what they believed was the most accurate picture of the average American fighter pilot ever assembled.
Then a 23-year-old scientist named Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels stepped in and quietly dismantled the whole premise.
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Daniels was not the kind of person you would picture in a military research lab. He was slender, wore glasses, liked flowers and landscaping, and had been president of the Botanical Garden Club in high school. But he had already done this kind of work before. His undergraduate thesis at Harvard involved measuring the hands of 250 students from very similar ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. What he found was that even among a nearly identical group of people, no two hands were alike. And when he averaged all the data together and compared each individual to the average hand, not a single person matched it.
He arrived at a conclusion that stuck with him. "When I left Harvard, it was clear to me that if you wanted to design something for an individual human being, the average was completely useless."
So when the Air Force handed him the pilot data, he already suspected what he would find.
Daniels took the ten dimensions considered most relevant for cockpit design, things like height, arm length, chest circumference, and sleeve length. He was generous with his definition of average, counting anyone within 30% of the range for each dimension as fitting the average. By that standard, the average height was 5 feet 9 inches, but anyone between 5'7" and 5'11" still counted.
He ran the numbers and compared each of the 4,063 pilots individually to the average across all ten dimensions.
Zero pilots matched.
Not a few. Not some outliers on the edges. Zero out of four thousand. Not a single American fighter pilot was average across all ten dimensions at the same time. Some had long arms and short legs. Others had wide shoulders and a narrow chest. Others were tall with short torsos. Every single pilot was a unique combination of measurements that the average cockpit fit poorly or not at all.
The cockpit designed for the average pilot fit nobody.
Daniels published his findings and the Air Force was forced to rethink everything. Instead of designing for a fixed average, they made the cockpit adjustable. Adjustable seats. Adjustable pedals. Adjustable harnesses and helmets. When they stopped trying to fit pilots to an average and started building systems around individuals, the crashes stopped.
That shift also gave us something we use every day without thinking about it. The adjustable car seat, the adjustable steering wheel, the adjustable office chair. All of it traces back to Daniels and his conviction that designing for the average is designing for nobody.
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โSo What Does This Have to Do With Your Money?
Everything.
Personal finance has the same problem the Air Force had. There is a version of the average person that most financial advice is built around. Save 15% of your income. Spend less than you earn. Max out your 401k. Buy a house. These are the cockpit dimensions of the average financial life, and just like that cockpit, they fit nobody perfectly.
Your financial situation is not average. It never was.
Maybe you are self-employed with variable income and the advice about consistent monthly contributions does not map cleanly onto your reality. Maybe you carry student loans that change the math on everything. Maybe you have aging parents who need financial support. Maybe you live in a city where the housing market makes the standard advice about buying versus renting nearly irrelevant. Maybe you have a spouse with a different money personality and a different relationship to risk.
None of these things show up in the average.
The principles of personal finance are consistent across almost everyone. Spend less than you earn. Invest the difference. Keep costs low. Build an emergency fund. These are the fundamentals and they apply broadly. But the order in which you do them, the tools you use, the timeline you are working with, the tradeoffs that make sense for your life, those are individual. They have to be built around you.
This is why the phrase personal finance exists. It is personal on purpose. The word is not accidental.
The person next to you at work might be aggressively paying down a mortgage because the psychological weight of debt keeps them up at night. That might be exactly right for them and completely wrong for you if you have high-interest debt elsewhere that should be the priority. Someone else might be putting everything into a taxable brokerage because they want flexibility before retirement age. Someone else might be focused entirely on building a business before they touch a retirement account. All of these can be the right answer depending on the person.
Daniels figured out that the answer was not to build a better average. The answer was to build something adjustable. Something that could meet each person where they actually were.
That is what your financial plan should do. It should be built around your income, your expenses, your goals, your timeline, your personality, your risk tolerance, and the specific problems you need to solve right now. Not the problems the average person needs to solve. Yours.
You are not average. Design accordingly.
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P.S. If you want me to coach you one-on-one and help you design your own individual plan shoot me an email.
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