Have you ever felt like you have the pressure to be extraordinary?
That you have to be rich or live a life of many travels or marry a good looking guy or girl or have the perfect family or be the perfect son or BE SOMEONE IMPORTANT!
I do and it’s only after doing some soul searching and reading a book that I realised why.
- SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE TELL US THAT
We hear it all the time. Successful entrepreneurs, celebrities, talkshow hosts and the likes all tell us that. They tell u that each of us are unique people. That we can do extraordinary things if we want to. That we can be whoever we want to as long as we put in the hard work behind it.
That’s wildly contradictory because if EVERYONE is extraordinary then NOBODY is extraordinary. So why are we being told this?
2. THE MEDIA ONLY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE OR THINGS
Scroll down your Facebook feed and pay attention to the articles you see. Stories of:
i) The youngest person to ever graduate with a PHD
ii) The most brutal killing
iii) The WEALTHIEST entrepreneurs in the world
iv) The CRAZY THINGS RICH PEOPLE BUY
v) The BRAVEST thing someone has done
What do these stories share in common? They are all about EXTREMES. Why? Because stories of both sides of an EXTREME spectrum win attention and garner eyeballs. So the media tends to write about these things.
How does this affect us though?
We are then told on a daily basis that if we want to be someone extraordinary, we have to be able to achieve something extraordinary. Do something extreme! That nobody else has done before.
That’s why we feel the pressure to do stupid things like having to show our Facebook friends that we are eating at this expensive Japanese sushi restaurant or are going for another trip to European holiday or that we are totally working hard at work and rocking at it.
That’s also why people do crazy things like shoot themselves dead to record a YouTube video. Because people only pay attention to you when you hit new extremes.
Why does this ANY of this matter?
It matters because by definition the vast majority of us aren’t extraordinary or go on to do extraordinary things.
It matters because we shouldn’t feel shitty about our normal lives just because it’s normal.
It matters because if we constantly feel like we should be extraordinary but aren’t, we unnecessarily feel unhappy about ourselves.
It matters because it’s only from removing the fear of being un-extraordinary, can we have the desire to work and improve ourselves to become extraordinary. Great athletes aren’t just born content with the talent they have. They constantly hone their skills because they have a constant feeling that they’re not good enough. That they need to do better and do more.
Some of the happiest people I know in life are the most ordinary people you’d ever imagine. So do we really have to be extraordinary?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space