Have you noticed how much time we spend thinking of the elites of this world? It is a surprising amount considering that we do not rub shoulders with them every day. On the one hand we often admire them, emulate them, respect them, and revere them. At other times we fear them, loath them, and even hate them.

Some of them we treat as if they were a part of our extended family—whether they would even wish to be or not. By giving them the status of a matriarch or patriarch, in absentia, we allow them to play a large role in our lives. They heal us, entertain us, educate us, perform magnificent feats of athleticism for our enjoyment, set the tone in the arts and culture, lead our government and military, and forge the technology that changes us and our world. Phew! Is there anything they cannot  do? Well… no there isn’t and I guess that is the point.

Yet for all their gifts and greatness they can be embarrassingly tone-deaf. We see this most often when they pretend that they are really just like us. It is a charade they like to play and while it might fool some, we of average timber often see through it and can find it both embarrassing and uncomfortable. Yet beacuse kin is kin so to speak, we grant them wide berth and like to imagine that they are paying attention to us. In return, we lavish them with the attention that soothes and salves their feelings.

Sure I would like to have the talents and skills that the elite do, but this is not because of envy on my part but rather the fascination I have when I think of how different their world is from ours. They are able to do everything. They run marathons and do triathlons. One week they might be on vacation and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with their children, while the next, sans offspring, they are summiting the world’s highest peaks. As an aside, they often do this without canisters of oxygen or gas as it is called by the cognoscenti in the mountaineering community. Carrying something to breathe? How plebian!

The elites overwhelmingly get and then talk about, advanced degrees. You see, just having an undergraduate sheepskin framed on the wall is embarrassingly passé in the modern world—like playing the plebian mentioned above. Naturally it was in graduate school that the elite took up the running of those marathons, summiting mountains, and a thousand and one other things that I would never be able to tuck into—things like running with the bulls at Pamplona or going native for a year or two with an Amazonian indigenous people to master their language and deep anthropological underpinnings.

They sing, they dance, they “do” scholarship, and they deliver speeches and TED talks that make audiences gasp, weep in admiration, and feel warmth in their hearts. They hold audiences in their hands with their wit, wisdom, insights, and knowledge of topics near and far. I cannot help but think of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Very Model of a Modern Major-General. (Yes, that is a young Linda Ronstadt, Kevin Kline, and Rex Smith in the scene)

Now, of course, the elite do not get out of bed in the morning like you and me. No, they prep for the day with mindfulness exercises, yoga, and attention focusing brain workouts. Nor do they eat breakfast like us—instead it is a handful of chai seeds and a glass of hemp milk. Heaven forfend if they ever consumed more than 1000 calories in a day. This means that they eschew (no pun intended but it is out there nonetheless if it works for you) foods that seem quite tasty to the rest of us. Oh, did I mention that they rise at a time when even the sun is still slumbering peacefully away? Sleep for them is an enemy—a thief that is out to steal them of their time and thus to be kept at bay.

At the office they have “administrative assistants” and they speak in a way that is borrowed directly from academia in that they are “doing work” in this field or that. You and I of course think of work as something that makes us sweat and our backs aches, like mowing lawns or driving a truck all day, but they define work as having done such things as publishing a paper summarizing research into nanotechnology, the cognitive sciences, or similar undertakings.

They just can’t help themselves can they?. They do so much that is admirable and indicative of the superior skills, talents, drive and the sterling character which steels their souls. Yet if they are tone-deaf in one ear by pretending to be like us, they are equally as hard of hearing in the other ear when they start to believe their own narrative. Yes, I know that even we average folk are sometimes tempted to strike a pose on this stage we call life, but for the elites it is as if they have caught a tiger by the tail and are not sure what would happen if they let go—assuming they even can!

I recently read of one of my former airline colleagues who is a very fast burner and high achiever in life. Elite university degree, piloting, this and that, and to top it off participation in a few Winter Olympics. In a long-form interview with a large city newspaper she stated “I don’t do bored.” Shame I thought. For is it not idleness that gives us the space to think and create? Even a personage as great as the esteemed Bertrand Russell thought it critical to find those moments that many would call “boring” so he could let his mind wander and come up with new things. If it was good enough for Bertrand Russell then it is certainly good enough for me!

This naturally leads to a question that seems foolish at first but actually has some heft to it. Why should we should put forth strenuous effort in life if we know that we are only going to go so far with the results? After all, doesn’t the sun already warm us all and the beauty of the world is there for everyone to see? This gets straight to one of the definitions of talent—the results gained for the time put in. Michael Jordon and I could each shoot baskets for an hour. Guess who would be better at the end of those sixty minutes? Thus we ask if we shouldn’t just leave the elites to crack on with their pursuits while the rest of us throttle back a little.

Good question but a couple of thoughts. One is the reality that life simply demands that we do a good amount of work. Sure there might be those here and there who can pursue whatever in life they wish and it must be fun, but I think most of us agree that this probably would not be too good for us in the long run. Somehow life would come back for what it feels it is due—and that might not be too pretty.

The second point is a more rewarding reason for us not to throw up our hands and leave it all to the elite. While I am not at all advocating work just for the sake of work (an outdated and wasteful concept in my mind), one of the strong points of us average folk is our firm footing in life. It is we who are the sinew and muscle of this world and we who get things done. Even though we are often pressed upon and taken advantage of by the elites, we are the true bedrock of our society and provide a safety net for many—including the A-listers of this world. Do you really think anyone can get very far without us to support them? No, of course not.

Let me give you two examples of how the average gent of yesteryear has taken care of the elite. These examples are meant to be fun and while you will see there is no danger of them being overly realistic, I do wonder where the comedy ends and the truth begins.

The first is the 1936 film My Man Godfrey in which William Powell turns in a masterful role as a Forgotten Man. A Forgotten Man, as I only learned recently, was an out-of-work figure in the Great Depression who had been pushed to the edges of society and thus overlooked by almost everyone—thus the term Forgotten. If you can spare ninety minutes this is a movie that, for all its graininess of old film stock quality, is well worth watching to see how Powell teaches an elite family a very gentle lesson in humanity and humility.

The second is downright playful but enjoyable to no end. A product of the pen of the witty English genius P.G. Wodehouse (and here I do not exaggerate with the term genius), the Jeeves and Wooster series is a masterclass in how to gently send-up the ruling classes. Wodehouse’s books have always been favorites for their innocent but freewheeling wordplay, but it is the incomparable team of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry who bring to life the linguistic interplay and the old idea of the servant being smarter than the Lord of the Manor: Jeeves and Wooster

As silly as these might seem to you, they are actually the basis for the approach that I take with the Just Average movement. While the elite will do many things that we cannot even dream of doing, at the end of the day it is our average character, forged in the furnaces of life, that allow us to take on all comers with equanimity, grace, humility, and a great deal of humanity.

When I think of the elite I admit that I often end up asking “Seriously?” Their accomplishments are often unfathomable to me and whether at any given moment they are either entertaining or annoying (or even both at the same time!) none of us needs to despair. Both the elite and the average will always have an interesting co-dependent dance going on in life and we in the average ranks will surely lend a hand to them, as we do to everyone else, when needed.

In the meantime, Stay Average!

Neal