He wanted that. That was his new desire: to be an average person enjoying life in a simple way. Lyndon explained that he realized that one’s lifelong desire doesn’t have to be for anything exceptional. It can be for a very simple form of comfort and joy. It can be for the pleasure of singing while performing a chore. Lyndon was an extraordinary intellect who wanted to make that fact irrelevant to his happiness. He knew he had a lot of work to do to get to the simple pleasure of being an “average person,” but he was excited by the idea of trying. As he sat telling me about his journey to happiness, he was speaking with a very excited voice. It was clear that he was now a very happy man who wanted to make a difference by sharing how he got that way. “Happiness and a meaningful life come from making differences. But this is the most important rule to follow: Always make the differences you can make,” he said, “not the differences you would prefer to make but can’t. As you keep making differences, your skill will automatically and effortlessly increase. Anything human beings repeat they get more skillful at. Including misery!” When he said, “Including misery!” he let go with a huge long laugh. That was his fun—exposing human folly and showing the way to avoid it.
Society pushes exceptionality After my weekend with Lyndon, I flew back home to Arizona with my head full of wonderful ideas. Already I had begun to apply them. Rather than always trying to be exceptional at everything, I discovered I could be happy with simply being an average person doing what I could do to make a difference. This took so much pressure off. Because trying to be exceptional was wearing me out and I was never satisfied. I was never exceptional enough, to begin with. And sometimes being exceptional took so much energy that I had to take time off to just crash and be depressed for a while until I couldn’t stand myself any longer and it was time to go out and try to be exceptional again. The other problem with holding myself to the standard of being exceptional was that I often couldn’t do it at all, and I got so discouraged, 111