Seth Godin created a quiz based on the US population. It is seven yes-or-no questions about ordinary things - education, faith, family, income – where the combination of answers shows just how more different people are than we might think.
We liked it so much we built a British version using UK numbers from the Census and a few of the big national surveys.
Nothing you answer is recorded. It happens only on your own device and stays there.
Do the quiz properly and something odd happens – even if you are the most textbook-average person in Britain you land at about 8%.
Which means more than nine out of ten people in the UK differs from you. So much for us all being the same!
Answer one or two questions differently and you are quickly down to fractions of a percent meaning there is a village hall of you, not a stadium’s worth.
On the face of it this is a fun statistical party trick, but it also explains something we often see in meetings.
Many believe their money situation is the strange one. The pension gap, the house that swallowed the savings, the inheritance that complicates things, the earnings that arrived late or in lumps.
People tell us these things in a half apologising sort of way, as though everyone else’s finances are tidy and theirs took a wrong turning somewhere.
The quiz suggests something else – there is no tidy everyone.
Seven ordinary facts about life and no combination covers more than a sliver of the population. Add money to it (careers, families, houses, health, luck) and the sliver becomes a splinter.
Your situation is not a deviation from normal because there is no normal to deviate from.
That matters, because “am I normal?” is the question behind a lot of financial worry. Am I behind? Should I have more by now? Is everyone else doing this better? It feels like a money question. It is really a comparison question, and the thing being compared against does not exist.
The better question is smaller and harder.
Am I on track for my life? Not the average life, and not the neighbour’s. The specific, statistically improbable one you are actually living, with its particular lumps and bumps.
That question cannot be answered by a spreadsheet. It takes someone knowing the whole odd shape of your situation. Which is most of what we do here.
The quiz takes about a minute. Have a go.