Appreciating the Ordinary
During my late teenager years, what I grown really interested in was stories of greatness. I chewed through the biographies by Walter Isaacson's: Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein. I read everything I could find about the American Physicist Richard Feynman. I watched and absorbed every interview of Elon Musk available online.
There was much to learn and I'm grateful I did read those materials. Unfortunately, the picture I had was incomplete.
It so happens that, with the ways things are set up, you can have absolutely no societal awareness and empathy for the condition of other, and still be highly rewarded, in the monetary sense.
I'd like to think that over the years I've grown appreciation for the ordinary.
I don't use the term “ordinary” in the disparaging sense, but int the matter of factual sense of “middle of the bell curve”. This is humanity, this is us.
It so happens that, given one's starting conditions and opportunities over time, one can happen to end up in the higher-end -- or in the lower-end -- of the distribution by fortune and happenstance. Still, the expected, in aggregate, is that we will be in the middle.
By skewing experiences to cover only the uncommon, I think the view I developed was highly myopic and, as I said, incomplete.
The question which I find the most interesting at this moment is: How can one drive upwards the whole distribution?. What can be done to influence things to be better, not only for oneself, but in aggregate?
What I come back to is the lesson of “leaving it better than you found it”.
My grandfather used to be a truck driver for many years, often driving through gravel roads with loose rocks.
What he would always do, when he saw a large rock loose in the middle of the way, was to stop the truck, get out, take the large rock out of the path.
As a kid, I'd ask him: “Why do you throw the rock out? Why don't you just drive around it this time, and most likely someone else would do it later?”
What he'd answer to me was that he was doing that for ourselves, since we would be traveling back through the same gravel road, and maybe the next time we'd not see the rock. Therefore, clearing the rock out of the way was the only sure way we'd not hit it on our way back.
I'd accept this answer, but I only came to appreciate the deeper wisdom later.
The fact is, there is no “someone else who would do it later”, precisely because everyone else is thinking the same way.
The reason you clear out the rock in the middle of the road is that you are making a better road for the next person who will cross it. The next person who will cross the road might be yourself, but that's not the point.
You are seeing a problem, something that can cause an accident, and you have the time and the means to fix it, so you simply do it, because that's the right thing to do.
You make it better than you found it.
This lesson comes from my grandfather, who worked decades as a truck driver and never said it outright, but modeled for me what “doing the right thing” looked like. This lesson was missing from every book I read about supposedly great men.