The problem with "normal"

Everyone talks about the new post-COVID normal. If you search "new normal" on Google, you will get over 22 billion hits.

Where did normal come from, and why does it have the power it does in our lives, in our institutions, in our world? How did it become like air—invisible, essential, all around us? As Ian Hacking was the first to point out, look up?normal?in any English dictionary and the first definition is “usual, regular, common, typical.” How did?this?become something to aspire? How did everyone being the same achieve the cultural force it has?

As noted, the word?normal?entered the English language in the mid-1840s, followed by?normality?in 1849, and?normalcy?in 1857. This is shocking for a word that masquerades as an ever-present universal truth. When?normal?was first used it had nothing to do with people, or society, or human behavior.?Norm?and?normal?were Latin words used by mathematicians.?Normal?comes from the Latin word?norma?which refers to a carpenter’s square, or T-square. Building off the Latin , normal first meant “perpendicular” or “at right angles.”

Why are we all rushing to be part of the new average and the way things are supposed to be? Here are reasons why, at least for those interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, the "new normal mindset" is a a bad idea:

1. It encourages a comfort and complacency that is toxic to innovation. Here are some lessons to LIV by in the world of golf.
2. It reinforces a fixed mindset instead of a growth mindset
3. It puts you back into a comfort zone instead of a discomfort one
4. It focuses you on the near term planning horizon instead of the next and the new
5. It reinforces the increasing acceptance of the consolidated power of unregulated oligopolies and the resulting consequences of the lack of market competition.
6. It makes you a defender instead of an attacker
7. It encourages tweaking the new normal instead of making it, once again, obsolete
8. It is a safe haven for those suffering from change and technofatigue
9. It implies never going back to the "good old days" is something we regret, rather than encouraging, since , in many ways, they weren't really that good for many after all
10. Reverting to the mean is hardly inspiring or aspirational

Let's stop trying to define and fit into to the new normal. Instead, let's continually create the next "normal" where more people get to live and work in the right hand side of the distribution curve.

Then you can join surgeons who live in Lake Wobegon, where they all get results that are above average.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs