The Best News at Boeing
In 2017, the chief executive of Boeing told a room of investors that more than eighty percent of the world's population has never taken a single flight. Never once. Most estimates put it even higher. And he was not mourning the number. He was grinning at it, because eighty percent who have never flown is eighty percent who might, someday, buy a ticket. To him it was not a fact about the world. It was runway.
The number probably feels wrong to you. You have flown. Everyone you know has flown. Flying is a hassle you complain about, a Tuesday. I trusted that exact feeling for years. My picture of the average person was built from me and the people near me, and it never occurred to me to check it.
The problem was never my judgment. It was the jury. Call it the everyone-like-me error. You build your model of the average person from the only sample you have: yourself, plus the people around you. But the people around you were selected by you. They live where you live, earn roughly what you earn, scroll what you scroll. They are the least average sample of humans you could assemble, and they are the entire panel you poll when you guess what most people think, want, or do.
So you guess wrong, constantly, and never feel it. The founder builds an app that only makes sense to founders. The politician is genuinely stunned by a result because everyone they know voted the other way. The expert explains a thing badly because they cannot imagine not already knowing it. The designer makes the button obvious, to the designer. Each one polled a jury of one and called it the public.
It runs the other way too. The weird private habit you hide, the embarrassing fear you think is yours alone, the opinion you assume is fringe: half the room is quietly hiding the same one. You are not as typical as you think, and you are not as unusual as you think. It is the same error both times. You measured everyone with yourself.
You cannot fix this from your armchair. The sample in your head is broken, and no amount of careful thinking unbreaks it. The only fix is a different sample. This week, put your idea in front of five people who do not share your job, your city, or your feed. Watch a stranger try to use the thing. Count instead of assuming. The eighty percent who never flew are not a rounding error. In most rooms on earth they are the majority, and you have never met them.
Before you say most people, ask who is actually in the room.