Thread by @evanlapointe

Once a businessperson learns statistics, they finally realize that most people aren’t anything like “most people.”

Here’s what that means and why it’s important...

We think most people who interact with our business look a certain way. Most people are male. Most people are 18-24. Most people liked Jurassic Park.

These are averages, not majorities.

Averages are possible for completely random samples. The average color is gray or some awful shade of brown that you get when you mix all of the colors together.

How is the average color a color nobody ever uses?

And averages almost never represent majorities. If we look at how people shop at Walmart (making up an example), 1/3 of people might buy $10 of goods, 1/3 might buy $20 of goods and 1/3 might buy $120 worth of goods. These are clusters.

So the average customer buys $50 of goods???

No! Nobody bought $50!

Once we understand these fundamentals of statistics, we understand how rare it is for averages to be valid at all, and how rarer it is for averages to represent “most people” in any way whatsoever.

“Most people” and “the average person” are extremely dangerous concepts in a business. They paint pictures that are usually entirely untrue and not representative at all of reality.

Then we deliver marketing campaigns to people who don’t exist. We build products for people who don’t exist. We set strategies around customers and markets that don’t exist.

Teams who are precise in understanding real people and how to tell how much randomness or clustering is happening are playing on the next level.

Maybe discuss this with your team some time this week, audit your habits, and drive change. You’ll see an immediate shift in the quality of ideas and the impact of execution.