Achieving the Ordinary
Legacy.
What is a Legacy?
It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see… - Hamilton
Over the past few weeks, until at least I caught a moderately miserable case of COVID, I’ve been in exam prep mode. I don’t say I’m “studying” for the PMP exam, but rather, that I’m “preparing” for it. To me, the word “studying” always had loaded connotations. It was the word floated over me for decades of my life as something that I had to do over sleeping, having fun, and being bored. It was the birthplace of my anxiety. It opened doors, sometimes, but it also closed a lot of windows when the sun was shining outside.
Preparing for this exam has, in many ways, resembled how I felt when I was preparing for jiu jitsu competitions. I would feel like I had to get all my life affairs in order, because for some reason, I felt like I was going to die. Not actually die, of course, but more like that, “This is a threat that is going to make me question everything I am and force me to confront reality, so I need to prepare mentally to have my entire existence shattered.” (Now you get a sense of how dire my K-JD experience felt.)
Death doesn't discriminate
Between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes
History obliterates, in every picture it paints
It paints me and all my mistakes
If exam preparation is like competition preparation, then it stands to reason that there must be a similar activity that is like regular daily training. If there was in the past, I didn’t know it. To me, for a long time, everything seemed like an exam. Everything was on the line in some way. Everything was a test of was I good enough. If I didn’t come out of whatever it was with something to show for it, then I might as well have wasted my time. If there was a chance that I could fail, I would feel queasy about it, gnash my teeth at night literally and figuratively in frustration at my lack of control, and generally cause everyone around me to be miserable, no matter how hard I tried to hide my emotions.
When you fear failure, you end up with a lot of success — but that success does not fill you up, but instead leaves you hollow and raw. It doesn’t show you who you are but rather tells everyone else what they need to see. I am grateful for the benefits and opportunities that my success — born largely out of privilege in the foundation and grit in the execution — has brought me. I live a comfortable life, but it is a different question of whether I live a fulfilling one.
He may have been the first one to die
But I'm the one who paid for it
I survived, but I paid for it
Achieving the ordinary is a paradox, because we think that it is impossible to achieve anything that is ordinary. An achievement has to be extraordinary…only if you believe it to be so. This is why running a 10-minute mile might be a humdrum slow run for one person, but a monumental achievement for someone who might have never considered themselves fit.
What matters in measuring the strength of our achievement and how much value it brings to us is, has been, and always will be, an internal calculus. It is why achieving the ordinary makes so much sense to me, in a lifetime so far of trying to stand out, to be special.
Jiu jitsu practitioners always talk about how much there is to learn, even after we reach black belt. For many years I thought it was about how much there was to learn about the technique; indeed, in discussion circles, people are always talking about how quickly the pace of “modern” jiu jitsu is evolving and how hard it is to keep up. It was only recently did it dawn on me that perhaps, the wiser of this crowd was talking about how much there was to learn about themselves.
Achieving the ordinary does not mean that we should stop trying to work hard, diminish the passion for our goals, and stop striving for greatness. We don’t need to throw away our shots. Achieving the ordinary can be compatible, dare I say, symbiotic, to achieving the extraordinary, for change does not start off as great tsunamis or deep canyons, but rather as small tremors in the earth of your being and a grain of sand falling from where it was once tightly held in place.
If there is one piece of advice I would give to myself at the beginning, it would be to never forget about achieving the ordinary. It matters little what you take from the experience so much as what you receive from it — jiu jitsu, exam preparation, and anything else. It is not what you have to show for something, but what that something has shown you.
Postscript
Let me tell you what I wish I'd known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story