You Need To Be Ordinary to Be Extraordinary

Hi there.

Welcome to the side of Medium where no one is making thousands of dollars off the internet and where people are just trying to get by today so they can have enough strength for tomorrow.

It’s not all dark and crooked here. There are sunny days and raining nights. There are moments of strengths and equal moments of weaknesses.

We’ve come to accept (or are accepting) that the shadow is company to the brightness of the sun.

What does it mean to be extraordinary?

According to the Collins’ Dictionary, being extraordinary means having some extremely good and special quality or being very unusual or surprising.

If you look at the word at face value, you’ll realize it’s a combination of two words :

EXTRA + ORDINARY = EXTRAORDINARY

Extra means more, better, additional, supplemental while ordinary means just the usual. If you’re a student of Grammar, you’d know that the base word is “ordinary” while “extra” is the prefix.

To be an extraordinary writer, you’ve got to be an ordinary writer, telling ordinary stories to an ordinary audience.

To be an ordinary writer is to be one with no special ritual or process to aid inspiration. You open up your blank space and you start to write. You draft things up and you shape the story as you go. It may not be a masterpiece but it’s your work. It’s your creative output.

To be an extraordinary engineer, you’ve got to solve ordinary problems. You may not build what will change the world but you could change the lives of people sharing the little corner of your world.

To be an extraordinary musician, you need to sing ordinary songs to a world of ordinary people.

Your first piece of work may be a piece of crap but that’s totally normal. It’s an ordinary thing that happens to ordinary people. Guess what? Some of the best comedians in the world still bomb sometimes. Yes, including Dave Chapelle.

A lot of us are putting pressure on ourselves to be outliers. Being an ordinary person already requires so much work. We’re too focused on being extraordinary that we’ve forgotten how to be normal.

How to enjoy a hobby without monetizing it.

How to enjoy meeting people without “networking”

How to enjoy life and make memories without whipping out our phones to “document” it.

We may make reels with the “I think I like this little life” audio but I’m not sure it’s true.

This little life isn’t enough for us. We have to be extraordinary. Special. Unique. Different.

When we already are.

There’s a lot about you that we can’t find in someone else. The way you see life is already unique. It’s very custom tailored to your context and your experiences. The way you think and the way you open up to the world are also different.

Like Cobhams said, “Let us have a world of ordinary people, living life the way God wants us to. If we have a world of ordinary people, extraordinary things will happen for you and for me.”

This pursuit of the extraordinary blocks us from seeing our ordinary lives and connecting with the world as it is. We get lost in the clouds while we should be rooted. I think it’s time to step out and touch grass.