AVERAGE IS THE NEW AWESOME

A celebration of ordinary awesomeness, for all of us who were told "You can do anything!" and then found out we actually can't.

The world is full of people - and books! - telling us how to be AMAZING, how to not just excel but blow everyone else away, how to be a badass. But if you look around, the world is mostly filled with ordinary people just plugging on. That reality might not be glamorous, but it's true to most people's experience, and that we've been led to think otherwise has resulted in a pretty harsh reality check. Crappy apartments, lame relationships, getting passed over for a great job (again) - this is not what many of us expected from our adult lives. But not everyone can be a superstar. And that's okay!

Sure, some of our peers might go on to become astronauts or billionaires. But most of us don't. Samantha Matt offers lighthearted encouragement to regular humans who find themselves collapsing under the pressure to be extraordinary. This is a manifesto for ordinary awesomeness--for the beauty that can be found when we acknowledge that good enough really is good enough, and that greatness is yours to define.

When today's adults first encounter the realities of failed (or delayed) dreams-- lame jobs, bad relationships, missed opportunities--it can be a devastating letdown. For a generation raised with participation trophies and the mantra You are special and you can achieve anything!, there's a demoralizing blow that comes with the discovery that no matter how much we prepared ourselves for greatness, we might just be average.

Average is the New Awesome is a manual for readers who feel hopelessly ordinary and frustrated that they didn't fulfill some kind of higher promise. Full of humor and honesty, along with plenty of clever lists enlightening factoids, and truly useful advice, Samantha Matt advises readers that it's OK if you're not where you thought you'd be in life by now. She encourages readers to throw their "life timeline" out the window and go after what they want, without worrying that they missed some narrowly defined window of opportunity.

A celebration of the everyday and an empowerment manifesto for the less glamorous stages of life, Average is the New Awesome gives readers the freedom to stop feeling ashamed of failure, to be patient when waiting for accolades, to change course when a goal isn't manifesting, and to be who you are right now.

Samantha Matt is the head of audience development at Reviewed, a USA Today website. She is also the founder and editor in chief of ForeverTwentySomethings.com, a blog that helps millennials navigate their twenties. The site gets 1 million page views and 417K unique visitors a month Its Instagram has 53k followers. Her writing has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, USA Today, Esquire, Redbook, and more. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.