Ordinary is the Extraordinary – How to Succeed Simple and Not Naive

It was 8^th grade. The other wizards were acing simultaneous equations while I struggled to divide 100 by 10. Maybe they were coached by the brilliant, read unknown books, or possessed secret notes. I was wrong.

I got an inkling of the “secret” a few years later when I got an ovation by the entire class for being the only one to solve a tricky combinatorics problem. From a math-struggler, I transformed into someone who fenced with conjectures; who self-learnt major concepts like calculus. Did I do something extraordinary? I wasn’t sure at the time.

I landed my first job as a Software Architect, then a Director of Engineering just a few years later, and then the Director of Tech & AI. It’s at this point when I found the explanation to an extraordinary career growth.

I’ll share that secret with you, but without any platitudes. Because adopting a belief at random is naive. The simple route involves seeing the bigger picture, examining all the pertinent factors, and then busting myths that we all hold very dear to our hearts. In this process, you’ll get an understanding instead of a belief. Understanding clarifies, but belief (regardless of what it is) always obscures.

Before we go myth-busting, let’s first understand how appearances fool people.

Work has both visible and invisible parts. Just like an iceberg, the small visible outcome is supported by a large invisible effort. We are fooled because we draw conclusions from only the visible (appearances), without putting in the effort to examine the invisible.

Consider Jack, who is trying to decide between a Sedan and an SUV. He has discovered many “features” of both cars through amazing sales experiences. The SUV comes in his favourite colour, has reading lamps, and the showroom offered soda and fries to his kids. This tipped the scale slightly and he bought the SUV.

The prospect of brilliant adventure soon turns into drudgery. The SUV has terrible mileage, an important factor from which he got distracted. No one used the reading lights. The wooden finish of the interiors didn’t compensate for the uncomfortable seats during long hours in traffic.

Jack’s friend, who instead bought the sedan, was happy with the comfortable seats, the pocket-friendly mileage, and didn’t miss any of the bells and whistles. The icing on the cake was the sedan’s inexpensive replacement parts, cheaper insurance, and a great safety rating.

There’s a lesson to be learnt here. However, two traps await us.

The first trap is to decide to never believe anyone. Now there is no harm in not taking something at face value and then finding out for yourself. But you’d observe that most of the skeptics never bother to find out; they only doubt. A person who doubts as an end result rather than a beginning point will spin. And he will take others with him.

The second trap is giving in completely: “That’s how life is. Everything’s a deception, and we can’t do anything about it.” Life is seen as shades of hardships and betrayals. That’s also a wrong lesson, because no attempt is made to improve things.

Both the above wrong lessons seek a universal belief that’s never tailored to the situation. The thing is always deceptive or always hopeless. It’s never acknowledging that some of them are good, some of them bad. And that we should differentiate between the two rather than live the average.

The real lesson to be learnt is that the product of deep-work requires a deep evaluation. For example, if one computer is more performant than another, it will only matter if your usage demands that extra. Or else, both will look the same.

When your observation is shallow, the good and the bad; the useful and the useless; the bargain and the rip-off; all look the same. That’s because their visible part are the same, while their invisible part are never evaluated.

For that deeper evaluation, gamers run comprehensive benchmarks whenever a new processor or graphics card is released. Sure, the difference between the two types of RAM might not matter to you, but it’s important to first find all the differences, and then check if those differences matter.

Now that we understand how appearances can deceive, let’s focus on work again.

When it comes to work, we must note both the visible and the invisible. Focusing only on the visible caused me to think that the other students were brilliant at math because they presumably did something extraordinary. But that was not the case. I’ll reveal the truth of that in a bit.

The visible part of good and bad work often looks the same. The world today has resorted to deception at an unprecedented scale, from little white lies to pyramid schemes. It takes time for the invisible part to rear its ugly head, and by that time it’s too late. Thus, trickery is what you need to protect yourself from. The moment you look past the deception, you instantly see the secret to doing the extraordinary.

In truth, extraordinary is actually ordinary. Not knowing this, people often try harder than required and still fail.

Consider people exceptional in their fields: they produce the finest music, write the best software, build the best companies, and invent the best things. Tomes have been written about the secrets to why they’re able to achieve remarkable levels of success.

Maybe someone’s success is writing ideas underwater. Or dunking himself in cold water every morning. Or carrying a voice recorder to note ideas down while jogging. These are rituals, which have their own uses, and you can adopt as few or as many of them. However, looking for rituals means we’re trying to find something extraordinary in these people. That’s naive. And in a moment I’ll tell you what the simple solution is.

One of the recent trends is that of pretence, which is merely keeping appearances as we’ve just learnt. One does not learn to build software well anymore; one instead learns to “crack the interview.” One does not learn to build useful stuff; one instead learns to “present their achievements better.” One does not build products that people want; one instead makes something “look far better than what it is.” The invisible does not deliver on the promise that the visible makes.

Why else will there be an entire industry that teaches you algorithms, not to apply it, but to get you into companies? Or that the best “system design courses” out there are to help you build Uber hypothetically in interviews, but not a solid piece of software for actual use? Or that the best data science tutorials are riddled with just Numpy array manipulations rather than actual statistical concepts?

In short, the result of pretence is wrong focus. The focus on the number of books read, not the amount of understanding gained. The number of sales made, not the number of satisfied customers. The revenue earned, not sustained profits.

Pretence fools by focusing your attention on the visible, hiding all dirty secrets in the invisible, and claiming that the visible represents the best version of the invisible. Whether it’s a seasoned SDE-4 who never actually learnt how to write code. Or an “AI expert” who only knows how to use ChatGPT APIs. Or a “Data Scientist” who proudly calculates the mean and standard deviation of an obviously non-normal distribution because “that’s what we do with numbers.” They all have the visible titles of an expert, but no invisible expertise backing them up. And they spend an inordinate amount of time polishing the visible, rather than refining the invisible.

Now here’s the kicker. Because people really bad at their work can appear to be “good,” you erroneously think that people who are great must be doing something extraordinary. But that’s not quite the truth.

I said before that the naive solution is looking at the “greats” to understand what makes them so. The simple solution, however, is investigating people who are not quite measuring up. When you actually look close, and I seriously encourage you to do so, you’ll realise that most of the “ordinary” people are actually not even doing average work.

Most never do what they promise. They take shortcuts. They skimp. They create complex rules so that they can pretend to do.

So what do the so called “extraordinary” people do? When they talk about a book, they would have actually read and understood it. They sat down and practiced rather than skimming. They wrote the software on their own, however long it took, rather than let StackOverflow do it for them. They actually DID the things they claimed rather than just PRETEND TO. And just by that simple act, got superpowers.

Everything in the world is simple, if you are just true to yourself and actually do what you’re promising to do. It is easier to learn the basics properly and apply it. But it is harder to pretend to have learnt something and then keep that pretence. Hence, you see everyone complaining about working hard yet getting nowhere. You now know why.

In short, the extraordinary are NOT doing anything extraordinary. As someone who learnt programming at the age of 11, sold software online while in college, earned money by writing articles, creating a few affiliate businesses, learnt four musical instruments, rose to leadership positions quickly, got a perfect GPA in his masters, and a lot more, I’m telling you that much of life is far simpler than what the world would have you believe. Extraordinary is merely doing the promised ordinary.

And what you see as ordinary is people pretending to do things, but not actually doing it. But if you believe their pretence, then you’ll go on a snipe-hunt for the extraordinary. And you will always return empty handed.

During my childhood, I finally became good at math because I sat down and learnt it, rather than pretending to learn it for the sake of my teachers. I actually took interest, instead of feigning it. The other students who were good also did the same, and that’s all they did.

If there’s one advice that I have for you, it is to just be true to yourself, and learn something without lying to yourself or others about it. And with just that simple act, you’ll become extraordinary. And that’s all there is to it.

The way to becoming extraordinary lies in the simple solution of doing the work, and not in the naive solution of witch-hunting for a golden shortcut.