Are we born to be ordinary?

My first assignment as a feature writer with a reputed newspaper in Mumbai was a spa review. I was all of 23 and brimming with enthusiasm. I had just finished my journalism course, had an inflated opinion about my own writing and was raring to take on the world.

The spa was a swanky, stand-alone one in a leafy, affluent part of the city. I don’t remember much about the massage itself, except that the air-conditioning was too high. All through it, I was not enjoying the experience; my mind was busy formulating what I was going to write. In the end I came up with a flowery, verbose piece that I would today probably describe as ‘cringe’. I made it a philosophical thesis on the deeper meaning behind a pleasurable experience, and was proud of my spa review that was not a spa review. I thought it was different, just like I was different, a unique specimen of humanity destined for greatness. It took a few months and innumerable copies criss-crossed with red marks to bring me down from my ivory tower. It also helped that I had a militant editor, the sleeping tigress who could be awakened by a typo, a factual error or a cub reporter too enthusiastic for her own good. Gradually, however, I began to accept the fact that I just might not be so special after all, that there were scores of writers better than me, and that a Pulitzer might not exactly be around the corner. 

This might be a trajectory that you have gone through yourself. At some point in your life, you might have been disabused of the notion that true greatness is within your reach. The data backs this. According to the Project Play report by the Aspen Institute, around 10 per cent of parents believe their child could reach the pros or the Olympics, although only 0.16 per cent of student athletes will get drafted by a Major League Baseball team and 0.0096 per cent will get picked by an NBA team. Approximately 0.4 per cent of men and 0.51 per cent of women in the US are CEOs. Out of billions of people, only around 990 individuals have won Nobels since 1901, when the awards were instituted.

We might all hero-worship this minuscule percentage of truly great people, but have we ever celebrated the fact that we are not one of them? This is why the argument of a new book, The Courage to be Ordinary by Ichiro Kishimi and translated by Haydn Trowell, resonated with me. Kishimi is the 15-million-copy bestselling author of The Courage to be Disliked. “Being ordinary isn’t failure—it’s freedom,” writes Kishimi.

“Freedom from constant competition, from chasing approval, from feeling habitually tense. Letting go of the need to be special will finally give your strengths the space they need to shine.” The sentiment stands out in an age when the self-help racks of bookstores are full of tomes to make you effective (10 Habits of Highly Effective People), rich (Psychology of Money), successful (100 Things Successful People Do) and happy (Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life). 

Kishimi turns a perceived weakness—ordinariness—into a strength, and I was curious to see how he would pull off this counter-cultural idea. He divides the book into chapters exploring the fragile superiority of those who need to be special, overcoming feelings of inferiority, starting from who you are and living your own life. He then goes in-depth into concepts like how birth order shapes our lifestyle choices, how there is no causal relationship between education and ability, and how self-manufactured anxiety boxes you in. 

Much of it struck a deep chord, like how losing a competition does not erase your value. I was reminded of how in school, I tried to find excuses to avoid swim meets even though I was a strong backstroker, because I was afraid of failure. Not winning a medal would destroy my fragile sense of self-worth. Or how, when you want to be special, your achievements and failures will make you fluctuate between pride and self-loathing. There was a time I consciously catalogued people into those ‘better’ and those ‘worse’ than me. Those ‘better’ would inspire awe, admiration and a desperate desire to please, while those ‘worse’ would inspire contempt.

For me, this narrative began to shift when I visited my cousin, a highly accomplished businesswoman, at her office several years ago. She let me sit in on one of the meetings she chaired, and I was thoroughly impressed by the way she commanded the room, led from the front and inspired the respect of her teammates. I told her this later, and added that I wished I could be more like her. Then she told me something that has remained with me ever since. She said, “You are not me, and I am not you. You play to your strengths and stop comparing yourself with others.” It was the first tile in the domino of my ego to come crashing down. Since then, I’ve tried to change my attitude with some measure of success. I’ve tried to play to my strengths without comparing myself to others, and see the best in everyone instead of measuring them by their ‘market value’. 

I am yet to get there. I fail every day, whenever I begin to look inward and indulge in self-pity or give way to pride. C.S. Lewis once said that true humility is not about self-abasement. A humble person, he said, “will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody”. Probably all you will think about him, said Lewis, is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. “He will not be thinking about humility,” he said. “He will not be thinking about himself at all.” It is not easy to get there, but I truly believe that as a race, our specialness does not lie in our being special, but in our being ordinary. It does not lie in winning a Nobel or participating in the Olympics. It lies in our ability to weep with others, to take joy in small things and to hold on to hope when everything seems against it.