I used to think that avoiding an average life required unusual talent.
Now I'm sure it begins with something simpler: not copying the default.
If I make the same choices as everyone around me, I should not be surprised to get similar results. The same education, the same career moves, the same habits, the same approach to investments and risk. None of those choices is necessarily wrong. They are simply unlikely to lead somewhere different.
What makes this difficult is that common choices rarely feel like choices. They feel normal. Sensible. Sometimes inevitable.
Doing something different is not automatically better. Contrarian thinking can become another form of imitation. But a different outcome usually means making at least one decision that the people around me would not make.
The difficult part is not finding that decision. It's accepting how unusual it looks before the result makes sense.