Average Joes Quotes

Are you suggesting I’m not normal? (Nykyrian) Oh yeah, baby, you ooze normality. From the top of that assassin’s braid to the tip of those boots that I’m pretty sure conceal retractable blades. You’re just an average joe. No doubt about it. Cause, you know, everyone sits for hours doing nothing but typing. (Kiara)

Revolution is a spectators sport. The majority will sit in the stands and watch the factions fight. At the end they will choose side with the team that is winning.

What would you prefer? Life in a maximum-security prison or trapped in Jurassic Park?" "Do I have a social standing in this prison?" "No. You're just an average Joe." "Then I guess I have to go with Jurassic Park." "Why?" "Well, I'll have constant fresh air, for a start, and also if I'm going to be anyone's prey, I'm going to be the prey of an animal that's acting out of instinct rather than psychopathy... You?" "If you're in Jurassic Park, I'm in Jurassic Park.

Would you believe I was in the neighborhood?” “No." “Well, how about that I needed to see you.” “Why? Did one of my neighbors call and say my cat’s been stalking their bunny?” One corner of his mouth went up. “You know, that sounds like a euphemism. A kind of salacious one” “Ooh, big words for Mr. Average Joe street cop,” she said, knowing she sounded bitchy but unable to help it. “Can you take out the angry eyes, Mrs. Potato Head, and just let me talk to you?

Dictators and despots, governors and generals-they all to often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

It’s not all “molly” and “asshat.” The etymologies of some words are, for the lexicographer and average joe alike, boring.

I was lucky that I was born bigger and faster than the average Joe, and play a game that people are stupid enough to pay millions of dollars to watch.

I'd never had a boyfriend, let alone a date with a full-grown man. But even if I was just an ordinary human woman dating the average Joe, there was no way in hell I'd let him order me about.

Honesty is the rarest commodity in the 21st century. No one looks to the political class or journalists for truth these days. The average Joe seems to spend most of their time peddling a ludicrous, flawless Facebook version of their lives. The peer pressure of political correctness forgoes truth for the sake of groupthink. It seems that comedians and writers represent the last bastion of candour out there today.

Give Compassion: Every day the average person fights epic battles never told just to survive.

What would you prefer? Life in a maximum-security prison or trapped in Jurassic Park?" "Do I have a social standing in this prison?" "No. You're just an average Joe." "Then I guess I have to go with Jurassic Park." "Why?" "Well, I'll have constant fresh air, for a start, and also if I'm going to be anyone's prey, I'm going to be the prey of an animal that's acting out of instinct rather than psychopathy." "Good answer, babe. As always." "You?" He shrugged casually. "If you're in Jurassic Park, I'm in Jurassic Park.

Joe certainly didn't seem concerned with his own enlightenment, but he did seem more intelligent than the average muscle neck. Then he raised his arm, bent his head, and sniffed his pit. Gabrielle looked at the plates in her hands. She should have used paper.

Donald set his sights on the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, even though Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, she couldn’t take his tests, and Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.

People liked to think of beauty as some natural gift, but Savine firmly believed that just about anyone could be beautiful, if they worked hard at it and spent enough money. It was merely a question of emphasising the good, disguising the bad and painfully squeezing the average into the most impressive configuration. Very much like business, really.

You’ve gotta work hard to stay on top, and when you stop wanting to work hard, you just become average. That happens to anyone.

I don’t like the term “Average Joe.” I prefer “Dolly,” because not only is the Everyman a sheep, but he’s also a clone. They all think alike and act alike.

The humanist revolution caused modern Western culture to lose faith and interest in superior mental states, and to sanctify the mundane experiences of the average Joe.

Why is Amy amazing and Andy's just able? Well, don't you know a lot of powerful, fabulous women who settle for regular guys, Average Joes and Able Andys?

saving habits, and where Average Joe went

Joe was so tired that he had slept through first hour Spanish, second hour history, and most of third hour English. The English teacher, Mrs. Lane, hadn't taken a liking to that. She decided to send Joe to the principal to discuss why he was so sleepy, which Joe hadn't taken a liking to.

elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’14 Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

Maybe they do. Maybe every stupid person you know cancels out every smart person you know and every good person you know cancels out every evil person you know.” “That’s right. That’s probably why everyone forgot about Jesus and Hitler, and just remembers their un-cancelled out contemporaries Average Jane and Average Joe,” I said.

The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.

The average person looks to be taught by the mediocre, not the excellent.

From a human perspective, the Bible has been scrutinized, tested, evaluated and analyzed more than any other document.

Until you know who you are, your life will remain average.

And he says, “I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. And I think I realized that I’m average, that there’s nothing remarkable about me. And I wanted to know if this is something other people think about.

LARKIN WATCHED Pike leaving, and in the moment he stepped outside, he was framed in the open door of their Echo Park house like a picture in a magazine, frozen in time and space. A big man, but not a giant. More average in size than not. With the sleeves covering his arms, and his face turned away, he seemed heartbreakingly normal, which made her love him even more. A superman risked nothing, but an average man risked everything.

Mental health discussions should not hog the spotlight when celebrities are involved. Everything should not just be about the Chester Bennington’s and the Robin Williams’s of the world. Yes, they were truly remarkable people in their own right, but if we focus on helping the Average Joe or Plain Jane, we might unlock their ingenuity. Don’t overlook the ‘little man,’ everyone has something important to contribute to society, regardless of their socio-demographic background.

Endurance is another matter altogether. Comfortable pace, regular dosage over a period of years and frequent runs stretching maybe twice as long as the average – these seem to be the keys to unlocking the almost limitless flow of endurance we’re all capable of producing.

... television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today support- and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let’s call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear, come across, to watchers. He chooses to sit out the enormously stressful U.S. game of appearance poker. But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It’s almost like voyeurism.

For the record, this is Joe Girard: Most average number of retail vehicles sold in one day--6 Most new retail sales in one day-18 Most new retail sales in one month-174 Most new retail sales in one year-1,425 Most new retail vehicles ever sold in a fifteen-year career- 13,001 Number one retail vehicle salesperson-12 consecutive years Joe's

To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy one step further. Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group. Steve Kamb, an entrepreneur in New York City, runs a company called Nerd Fitness, which “helps nerds, misfits, and mutants lose weight, get strong, and get healthy.” His clients include video game lovers, movie fanatics, and average Joes who want to get in shape. Many people feel out of place the first time they go to the gym or try to change their diet, but if you are already similar to the other members of the group in some way—say, your mutual love of Star Wars—change becomes more appealing because it feels like something people like you already do.

All my career experience is additive. Each role, client, position, project, challenge, and industry—all of these are basically my layers. These layers stack-up and become points of reference for me as I engage in the subject matter. When I sit down to create, I flatten all the layers in that moment. I use all that experience—all of those years of work—in the exact moment I go to create.16

Now think about the average person who receives a diagnosis and promptly announces, “I’m going to beat this.” Someone may not accept the condition and the outcome the doctor outlines, but the difference is that most people haven’t truly changed their beliefs about not being sick. Changing a belief requires changing a subconscious program—since a belief, as you’ll soon learn, is a subconscious state of being.

67 percent of the women told the researchers that they didn’t exercise regularly, and 37 percent said they didn’t get any exercise. After this initial assessment, Crum and Langer divided the maids into two groups. They explained to the first group how their activity related to the number of calories they burned and told the maids that just by doing their jobs, they got more than enough exercise. They didn’t give any such information to the second group (who worked in different hotels from the first group and so wouldn’t benefit from conversations with the other maids). One month later, the researchers found that the first group lost an average of two pounds, lowered their percentage of body fat, and lowered their systolic blood pressure by an average of 10 points—even though they hadn’t performed any additional exercise outside of work or changed their eating habits in any way. The other group, doing the same job as the first, remained virtually unchanged. This

The death of quality foreshadows the death of humanity. What is the point of humanity if it does not produce the highest quality and excellence? A humanity that is not ascending is descending. As it is, the crushing weight of averageness and mediocrity presses down on everything and makes all high things flat, drab and dull. All the tall poppies have to die. The only tall poppies the mediocre like are those associated with wealth, beauty and fame. They despise the intelligent, the artistic and the technical.

In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life. The modes of presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more… well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it.

Time and again I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe’s. The answer is that no one has been willing to pay the wages and benefits, and thereby attract—and keep—the quality of people who work at Trader Joe’s. My standard was simple: the average full-time employee in the stores would make the median family income for California. Back in those days it was about $7,000; as I write this, it is around $40,000. What I didn’t count on back there in the 1960s was that so many spouses would go to work in the national economy. When I started, average family income was about the same as average employee income. The great social change of the 1970s and 1980s moved millions of women into the workplace. Average family income soared ahead. But we stuck with our standard, and it paid off.

an important point, throughout this book, whenever I describe work done by Jane Doe or Joe Smith, I actually mean “work done by Doe and a team of her postdocs, technicians, grad students, and collaborators spread far and wide over the years.” I’ll be referring solely to Doe or Smith for brevity, not to imply that they did all the work on their own—science is utterly a team process. In addition, as long as we’re at it, another point: At endless junctures throughout the book, I’ll be reporting the results of a study, along the lines of, “And when you do whatever to this or that brain region/neurotransmitter/hormone/gene/etc., X happens.” What I mean is that on the average X happens, and at a statistically reliable rate. There is always lots of variability, including individuals in whom nothing happens or even the opposite of X occurs.

Only people who have a world-historical perspective can change history. The average person has only a domestic, ahistorical perspective. Look at social media. It’s full of people without a clue what’s going on. Immense historical forces have been unleashed all around them, and all they care about is posting their brain-dead, vacuous observations and their self-pitying, whining woe-is-me statements about how shitty their lives are and how no one understands them. As well as countless memes and selfies, of course. You just have to love those lolcats on skateboards, right, hoomans? They are forever trapped in their parochial little world of trivia. Why are our books so unsuccessful? It’s because they announce, with the volume of Stentor at Troy, a world-historic agenda, but we are surrounded by pygmies who stare at us like cows in line at the abattoir.

The average household income in America is right around $50,000 per year, according to the Census Bureau. Joe and Suzy Average would invest $7,500 (15 percent) per year or $625 per month. If you make $50,000 per year and have no payments except the house mortgage and live on a budget, can you invest $625 per month? Follow me here. If Joe and Suzy invest $625 per month with no match into Roth IRAs from age thirty to age seventy, they will have $7,588,545 tax-FREE! That is almost $8 million. What if I’m half-wrong? What if you end up with only $4 million? What if I’m six times wrong? Sure beats the 97 out of 100 sixty-five-year-olds who can’t write a check for $600! I would submit to you that Joe and Suzy are well below average. Why? In our example they started at the average household income in America, and in forty years of work never got a raise. They saved 15 percent of income and never increased it by one dollar. There is no excuse to retire without financial dignity in the United States today. Most of you will have well over $2 million pass through your hands in your working lifetime, so do something about catching some of that money. Gayle asked me one day if it was too late for her to start saving. Gayle wasn’t twenty-seven like Joe and Suzy. She was fifty-seven years old, but with her attitude you would have thought this lady was 107. Harold Fisher had a much better outlook at age one hundred than Gayle did at age fifty-seven. Life had dealt her some blows and had knocked most of the hope out of her. A Total Money Makeover is not a magic show. You start where you are, and you do the steps. These steps work if you are twenty-seven or fifty-seven, and they don’t change. Gayle might be starting the retirement investing step at sixty that Joe and Suzy start at thirty years old. Gayle was unwise to enter her sixties without an emergency fund and with credit-card debt and a car payment. She, like all of us, couldn’t save when she has debt and no umbrella for when it rains. Would it have been better for Gayle to start when she was twenty-seven or even forty-seven? Obviously. But once she was done with the pity party, she still needed to start with Baby Step One and follow The Total Money Makeover step-by-step to put herself in the best position possible.

... television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today support- and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let’s call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear, come across, to watchers. He chooses to sit out the enormously stressful U.S. game of appearance poker. But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It’s almost like voyeurism.

the main difference between writing JavaScript code like the average Joe (or Jill) and writing it like a JavaScript ninja is understanding JavaScript as a functional language.

Not only is there no longer a mass market, but most of the successful companies, game-changing innovations, and products and services we care about were designed to cater to people at the edges of that curve, not to the average Joe in the middle of it.

the almighty dollar, and ways that investors could reap the benefits of big business. The stock market allowed the average Joe with a computer, some research skills, and business sense to rake in big bucks easily. This was something instilled in Roger during his tenure at Penn State and reaffirmed

In other words, the difference in expertise between theologians and “average” believers is small — not nearly as great as the difference in expertise between professional evolutionists and science-friendly laypeople. The difference between theologians and believers is not their differential acquaintance with the truth about God, but the greater acquaintance of theologians with the history of theology.People like Hart, despite their intelligence, have no more handle on the nature of God than do Joe and Sally in the street. Theologians are, as we all know, simply confecting things about God, and then selling them using fancy words and their academic credentials. Let Hart give us one bit of evidence that he has greater insight into God than, say, Rick Warren, and then I’ll pay attention to what he has to say. Otherwise, I see Hart as retreating to the Last Redoubt of the Theologian: the definition of God as something that is immune to all disproof—and thus subject to Hitchens’ Razor: “what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." The 'Best Arguments for God's Existence' Are Actually Terrible (New Republic, Jan. 16, 2014)

Save yourselves from strangulation by stuff! You keep talking about how much more you need of this or that, but you don’t need anything—well, anything but Jesus. Most Americans don’t have true needs. We have more pressing wants than others, sure, but how many Americans won’t eat anything tonight? How many don’t have a place to live? How many have nothing on their feet or bodies to keep them warm and covered? Our homeless have it better than some of the world’s average Joes. That’s just wrong.

Whereas orthodox Christianity answers Jesus’ question to Peter — “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29) — by affirming that Christ was both God (the Creator of the universe, the Lord of Israel) and human (an average Joe, yet without sin), these heretical thinkers answered the question differently.

In a hilly, long-course race, your focus must be on “smoothing” the course. The power on uphills must be restricted by gearing down and keeping your power output below your functional threshold power (FTP) (or even lower on longer climbs). The typical newcomer to Ironman-distance racing pushes far too hard on hills, especially early in the race, and pays the price later as high fatigue sets in. •  For short climbs of up to 5 min. duration, athletes should consider an effort ceiling of 90–100 percent of FTP. •  For longer climbs, consider an effort ceiling of 80–90 percent of FTP. •  For all climbs, it is very important to “save some watts” for cresting the apex of the climb. Novices tend to have their highest watts at the base of a climb. The intelligent athlete will have his or her highest watts over the top of a climb and accelerate down the backside. Experienced power users know that higher lactate levels can be cleared during the descent and after the rider has returned to cruising speed. •  On the downhill side, stop pedaling and coast in the aero position when your pedaling cadence becomes so high that you begin to breathe more heavily. If in doubt, coast the downhills so long as your speed is well above your average for the race.

Reading was the only subject at which I excelled. I would much rather be reading James Fenimore Cooper than dealing with participles in French. My poor school performance was puzzling because my parents saw that I possessed intelligence and curiosity. Marine biology became a passion. When I asked them to drive me to Boston to hear lectures by Jacques Cousteau, my first hero, they were happy to do so. They took me to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, a paradise for a kid in love with water. I was obsessed with learning from those men who explored the deep. I wanted to go deep. I was told that if I kept up my grades I could come back one summer and intern at Woods Hole. That never happened. My grades were below average. That became the great mystery of my childhood: Why was I having

The average Whole Foods shopper is affluent, educated, and sophisticated,

Jill buys an index mutual fund that tracks the overall stock market, never touching her money and earning the same return as the overall stock market. Average Joe "tinkers" with his portfolio, purchasing some mutual funds through his financial advisor and investing in stocks whenever he gets a particularly juicy tip from his neighbor. Joe earns the same return as the average investor in the stock market.

What makes cyber so potentially devastating is first and foremost our utter dependence on the stuff for everything that we do in life. It’s easy to grasp and understand the benefits [of digital technology]. It’s not so easy to understand our dependence on it and consequences associated with being denied that stuff, based on the unbelievable dependency that we have. Medications, banking, medical, just information you know. . . . I tend to think more in terms of things from an intelligence and military perspective, but an average Joe’s way of life would be dramatically affected.” He

For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

PEOPLE are too full of themselves, says David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. Joe Namath, a star quarterback of the 1960s, once shouted to his bathroom mirror: “Joe! Joe! You’re the most beautiful thing in the world!”—with a reporter watching. But it is not just celebrities who puff themselves up, and the evidence is not just anecdotal. The proportion of American teenagers who believe themselves to be “very important” jumped from 12% in 1950 to 80% in 2005. On a test that asks subjects to agree or disagree with statements such as “I like to look at my body” and “Somebody should write a biography about me”, 93% of young Americans emerge as being more narcissistic than the average of 20 years ago.

I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today. There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.” That.

I left my car on the street, walked up across the dead yard, and a guy I took to be James Lester opened the door. He was average-sized in dark gray cotton work pants, dirty white socks, and a dingy undershirt. His hair was cut short on the sides and on top, but had been left long and shaggy in back, and he looked at me with a squint. He was thin, with knobby, grease-embedded hands and pale skin sporting Bic-pen tattoos on his arms and shoulders and chest. Work farm stuff. I made him for thirty, but he could’ve been younger. He said, “You’re the guy who called. You’re from the lawyer, right?” A quarter to eleven in the morning and he smelled of beer.

Hey, Dylan,” I said, holding my orange ball. “You got rid of the Mohawk.” Lark and Raven’s stepbrother ran his hand over his bald head and sighed. “Yeah, I’d been thinking about going the business man route for a while. Kept going back and forth about cutting it. A few weeks ago, I got drunk at Lark’s place. The sisters were nice enough to shave my head while I was passed out.” Nearby, Raven laughed so hard she had trouble distracting Vaughn who was still trying to win the game. Dylan glared at her then shrugged. “Gonna let it grow out and play the average Joe shit.” “Good luck with that,” I said, glancing at the bathroom and hoping Bailey would appear. When she didn’t, I walked to an open lane and rolled the ball. It took out a single pin which was one more than I expected. A lane away Raven struggled to win against Vaughn. She bent over one direction. When her ass didn’t do it, she bent forward and adjusted her tits. A distracted Vaughn missed his strike with a single pin remaining. Before I could hear him complain and her celebrate, Cooper and Tucker appeared next to me. “I liked the way you handled that fucker,” Tucker said, arms crossed tightly. “You always know how to deal with these losers while looking like a Boy Scout. A good skill to have.” Ignoring them, I rolled the second ball and managed to take out three pins. A new record for me. “What’s with the silent shit?” Tucker asked. Sighing, I looked at them and frowned. “I want to be with Bailey. We just started dating, but here I am jumping through hoops for you two. You do this shit with every guy?” “Most are losers,” Cooper said. “Most never do the second date thing. They bang then hang. If they’re lucky, she never mentions it to us and we don’t kick anyone’s ass. You’re the first boyfriend type she’s had.” “Our family needs good people,” added Tucker. Cooper shifted his stance and shook his head at his brother. “He doesn’t want that life. Nick wants to be a teacher.” “Why?” “Who cares?” Cooper said. “It’s what he wants. Sounds like a nice safe life for our little sister, don’t you think?” Tucker’s expression froze and his dopey brain took awhile to put things together. By the time he figured it out, I’d rolled a gutter ball, Bailey returned, and Vaughn declared his wife a cheater. “It’s only fair!” Raven cried as Vaughn threw her over his shoulder and spun her around. “You’re a better bowler and I want to win. Cheating was the only card I could play.” “Making me think some fucker was looking at your ass was low, Raven.” “So is naming our first born son Maverick. You’re just looking for trouble with a name like that.” Vaughn lowered her to her feet then grinned. “My boys will be nothing but trouble. They’ll own this town and chase pretty girls like Scarlet and Lily.” “Hey, keep your pervy kid away from my daughter!” Tucker hollered, looking pissed. Cooper grabbed his brother and they wrestled onto the ground. By the end of pounding each other, they were both laughing.

Protestant congregations.  These surveys found that, out of about one thousand churches who had been asked about sexual abuse since 1993, allegations of child abuse averaged 70 per week. 

Unfortunately, even though Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, she couldn’t take his tests, and Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy

Why You Need More Sleep Read: Psalm 4:8 Habit: Rest I lie down and sleep,” said David, “I wake again, because the LORD sustains me” (Ps 3:5). He also said, “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety” (Ps 4:8). As David showed, peaceful sleep is an act of trust and a sign of humility. It shows that we know God is in control and will watch over us when we are at our most vulnerable. Sleep is a spiritual activity and a matter of stewardship (see articles “Sleep as a Spiritual Activity” and “Stewardship for a Good Night’s Sleep”). But sleep is also a spiritual discipline. As D. A. Carson says, Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night’s sleep—not pray all night, but sleep. I’m certainly not denying that there might be a place for praying all night; I’m merely insisting that in the normal course of things, spiritual discipline obligates you get the sleep your body needs.4 A number of factors affect the quality of your rest, the most important being how long you sleep. The amount of sleep a person needs varies from individual to individual and changes over the course of their lifetime. But if you’re like most people, chances are you’re not getting the sleep you need for your body to be fully rested. Here is the average number of hours of sleep, based on age, a person needs every day: Six to 13 years of age: nine to 11 hours 14 to 17 years of age: eight to 10 hours 18 to 25 years of age: seven to nine hours 26 to 64 years of age: seven to nine hours 65 and older: seven to eight hours5 The amount of sleep you need is largely due to your genetic makeup—it’s out of your control. Look at your habits and schedule and try to make whatever changes are necessary so you can get the rest your body requires. As David showed, peaceful sleep is an act of trust and a sign of humility. PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY: Because our spiritual growth is tied to physical rest, we are obligated to get the sleep we need. For your next reading, go to The Meaning of Life—Explained. Return to Alphabetical List of Articles by Title.

People may tell you they want to vote for Biden because they’re “woke” and want to appease the mob, but I have a hard time believing that people will knowingly go into a voting booth and vote to earn 30 percent less and destroy their 401k. I don’t believe they will choose to let anarchy run wild and show up at their front door, demanding to take all they have worked so hard for. I don’t think the average American will go in a voting booth and vote to put an impossible burden on our health-care system, further worsen their children’s education, or give their jobs away to illegal workers or China. Know that’s what you will get if you choose Joe Biden and his America-hating teammates.

a headline in the Daily caught his attention: “Senior Men Face Life with Debts, Few Jobs.” The article made his heart sink. The average debt among graduates was two hundred dollars, it said, and the average four-year tab was more than two thousand. Both were staggering amounts of money for someone like Joe in 1934.

Inaction is itself an action;

smooth is fast.

If you think the average law-abiding citizen feels strange finding himself in a cell, imagine how a cop feels. It’s not natural. It’s like a dog being peed on by a lamppost.

He tilted his head back like she’d slapped him. “Are you suggesting I’m not normal?” She held her hands up in mock surrender. “Oh yeah, baby, you ooze normality. From the top of that assassin’s braid to the tip of those boots that I’m pretty sure conceal retractable blades. You’re just an average joe. No doubt about it. Cause, you know, everyone sits for hours doing nothing but typing…” Nykyrian felt another peculiar urge to smile at her sarcasm. He had no idea why she charmed him, especially given the implied insult.

Thank you for being my brother’s good friend,” she said softly. “He needs you.

you want to be a leader, lead and be visible. Don’t hide in your office; walk the floors and talk to your staff.

Dictators and despots, governors and generals–they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

Carry individual items as opposed to whole lines. We wouldn’t try to carry a whole line of spices, or bag candy, or vitamins. Each SKU (a single size of a single flavor of a single item) had to justify itself, as opposed to riding piggyback into the stores just so we had a “complete” line. Depth of assortment now was of no interest. As soon as Fair Trade ended in 1978, we began to get rid of the hundred brands of Scotch, seventy brands of bourbon, and fifty brands of gin. And slowly (it was like pulling teeth) we dismantled the broad assortment of California boutique wines. No fixtures. By 1982, the store would have most of its merchandise displayed in stacks with very little shelving. This implied a lower SKU count: a high-SKU store needs lots of shelves. The average supermarket carries about 27,000 SKUs in 30,000 square feet of sales area, or roughly one SKU per square foot. Trader Joe’s, by 1988, carried one SKU per five square feet! Price-Costco, one of my heroes, carried about one SKU per twenty square feet. As much as possible I wanted products to be displayed in the same cartons in which they were shipped by the manufacturers. This was already a key element in our wine merchandising. Each SKU would stand on its own two feet as a profit center. We would earn a gross profit on each SKU that was justified by the cost of handling that item. There would be no “loss leaders.” Above all we would not carry any item unless we could be outstanding in terms of price (and make a profit at that price per #7) or uniqueness. By the end of 1977, we increased the size of the buying staff, adding one very key person, Doug Rauch, whom we hired out of the wholesale health food trade. Leroy, Frank Kono, Bob Berning, and Doug rolled out Five Year Plan ’77, which for purposes of this history I call Mac the Knife. Back in those days we had no idea how sharp that knife would become! We just wanted to survive deregulation. Everything now depended on buying. So here we go into the next chapter, Intensive Buying.

Consider putting one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in boiling water. This may seem to be balanced living when you average it out, but these opposite extremes won’t make us comfortable or happy in real life.

The worst kind of marriage is the one that aims for happiness. Don’t tell me that every marriage should have that grand aspiration. A marriage reaching for happiness is like any average Joe wanting to make a cake as tall as Mount Everest and as colorful as a tropical island. And on top of that, to make it edible. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But tell me how many people can afford that kind of happiness? We can make do with a sloppy cake as long as it doesn’t topple over. Cracked, fine. A bit dense, no problem. Oversweetened, we can live with that. Underbaked, it won’t kill you. Once I watched a movie in which a woman baked a birthday cake for her husband. And then she thought it was not perfect, and she dumped it into the trash can. Oh, I laughed so hard someone had to shush me in the theater. But people can be stubborn. I shouldn’t have laughed at the woman in the movie. Lucy wanted her life to turn out like that perfect cake. It did not, so she dumped it, along with everything else. Katherine, perhaps your marriage to Andy will still have some hope: if you both can learn to love a lopsided cake.

Finding a person to declare your craziest, most profound insecurities to is not exactly a picnic. But the bureaucratic idiocy of America’s healthcare system turns what should be a chore into torture. If you’re a middle-class person in America, the dance goes like this: You call your insurance provider to find a meager list of therapists who take your insurance. Most of the people on the list are licensed clinical social workers or licensed mental health counselors. They can be wonderful and very helpful, but they often have less schooling and experience than, say, psychologists and PhDs. After digging deeper, you find that some of these therapists don’t take your insurance after all; others have full client lists. And even if they do have space in the day to treat someone, they might not be interested in treating you. According to one study, a low-income Black person had up to an 80 percent lower chance of receiving a callback for an appointment than a middle-class white person. And even though intellectually, therapists tell you that anger can be a helpful and legitimate emotion in processing trauma, God forbid you actually seem angry on the phone. Several mental health professionals have told me that therapists often avoid rageful clients because they seem threatening or scary. Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients. They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But say you get lucky and find a licensed clinical psychologist with an open slot. The psychologist is white, of course (86 percent of psychologists in the United States are), which isn’t ideal if you are a person of color. But, fine, whatever: You just need to receive an official diagnosis for your insurance. You are certain you have complex PTSD, but he can’t diagnose you with that because it’s not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Your insurance only covers treatment for conditions listed in the DSM in order to assign a number of sessions to you. Most forms of insurance will pay for, say, only six months of therapy relating to anxiety, ten for depression, as if you should be better by then. Another consequence of C-PTSD not being in the DSM: This psychologist hasn’t been trained in treating it. He says he doesn’t believe that it’s a real diagnosis. He’d like to provide you with some questionnaires to see if you have something he can actually handle—bipolar disorder, maybe, or manic depression. This does not inspire confidence, so you leave. After some internet sleuthing, you find a woman of color who seems really cool. She’s specifically trained in the treatment of complex trauma. She has blurbs on her website that resonate with you—it seems as if she might truly understand you. But she doesn’t take insurance. (Psychologists are the least likely of any medical provider to take insurance—only about 45 percent of them do. And most of the time, the ones who don’t are the most qualified practitioners.) You can’t exactly blame her. You learn on the internet that insurance companies haven’t updated reimbursement rates for therapists in up to twenty years, despite rising rates for office rent and other administrative costs. If therapists were to rely on reimbursement rates from insurance alone, they’d wind up making about $50,000 a year on average, which is fine, but like, not great if you’re an actual doctor.

The hallmark of backlash conservatism is that it approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogant impositions of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly summarized during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to the New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”1 These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Backlash conservatism, Bauer’s comment reminds us, deals in outrage, not satisfaction; it claims to speak for the voiceless, not the powerful. And in this election cycle it reached its fullest, angriest articulation. The

The average Joe in America is expected to move 11.3 times in his life. Who knows about Average Jane.

I am not sure how, in a democratic society, we can justify letting people live like this-people who are doing the work the average Joe Blow American wouldn’t do for an hour without calling his lawyer to report physically abusive conditions, and demanding ten years wages and punitive damages in the millions.

They were merchant families, mostly, descendants of Englishmen who'd gotten rich trading with the tsars and sultans and rajahs of long ago, then come over to America because all their money didn't stop the aristocrats from snubbing them. Now their great-grandchildren just made a few investments here and there and kept charitable institutions the way an average Joe keeps a pet.

When I was a kid, no one knew that I was autistic. Everyone—including myself—knew that I was weird and unlike my neighbors, friends, classmates, and peers. But without the label of autism, I wasn’t segregated. I went to school and was mostly placed in regular classes, where I sometimes did very well and sometimes was bored and well below average, despite being hyper intelligent. I met all kinds of kids and lived in a neighborhood where I made friends, most of whom I’m still in touch with 40 years later. These relationships could be confusing and weird. Some of my “friends” teased me for saying the wrong things, wearing the “wrong” clothes, or liking different music than they did. When I responded by teasing them about their music, clothes, or statements, they got angry and defensive with me. The same rules did not apply. If I stared at someone out of curiosity, that was rude. If someone stared at me because I was weird, that was somehow okay. I came to learn that there was a social pecking order and some people did try to be my friend because they saw me as less than and able to be dominated. Others saw me as an equal or recognized that I wasn’t going to attempt to dominate them. When I asked people out on dates, I was often laughed at but sometimes—to my delight—I was accepted. Of course, I’d still be heartbroken when my date cheated on me or otherwise hurt my feelings. The idea that autistic people don’t have feelings is pathologized and projected onto us so furiously that periodic reminders that we do have feelings and that it is okay are important.

Here’s the crux of the matter. Oil and gas companies do the kind of risky, capital-intensive work that the average Joe, the average mom-and-pop business, even the average country, doesn’t do for itself. In so doing, they can make a spectacular pile of money, but they can also make a tremendous amount of mess. And ruin. And even catastrophic, polluting apocalypse, when they really put their shoulder into it. But they are also big enough and hold enough sway that even big powerful governments tend to defer to them when it comes to how to best police their behavior.

Sie haben es vielleicht niemals in diesem Licht betrachtet, aber alles, was Sie tun, steht unter ständiger Beobachtung.

Holy crap does smiling make a difference. Smiling makes you feel better. Try it now. I’ll wait… The body is the mind. Neurons fire when you smile. It may not get you out of deep depression, but hell it can help the average joe have a merrier day. The best part is you have complete control over whether you smile or not, and it is absolutely free.

The businessman’s forte was in the stock market, the almighty dollar, and ways that investors could reap the benefits of big business. The stock market allowed the average Joe with a computer, some research skills, and business sense to rake in big bucks

Maybe you are asking the same question I ask: What happened to my life? What happened for most of us is reality. Instead of finding fame and fortune, normalcy and “never enough” found us. We are average Joes, but is that really a problem? Definitely not! So-called average Joes are the ones who make the world work. God seems to have a special fondness for average Joes. Before they accomplished extraordinary deeds, normal guys like Gideon, David, Peter, and Paul went about their farming, sheep herding, fishing, and tent making. Even Jesus, our Redeemer, Healer, and coming King, started out using a hammer and saw in a carpenter’s shop.

East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. “He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him. “In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail. “This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?

This was so even though, as everyone knows, the United States spends far more on health care than any other industrialized country—an average of almost $13,000 per person per year, according to CMS, over $5,000 more than any other high-income nation.

He was comfortable in his inconspicuousness, but his inconspicuousness was mainly because no one paid much attention to anyone anymore. Everyone was too self-obsessed, everyone too attached to their phones. Twenty years ago you had to make an effort to blend in. Now you went anywhere, held a phone in your hand, and you became any old Average Joe.