Make your Ordinary Life Become EXTRA-Ordinary

Let me tell you about excuses—we all have them and usually will employ them often. Think about it. Some are small and unessential, while others can lead to massive issues and roadblocks for yourself and those around you.

I have used excuses more often than I would like to admit and I have been a quitter. I have also lived and been a part of EXTRA-ordinary things, but I am simply just an ordinary dude. So, what takes ordinary to extraordinary?

Often when we think of the word “extraordinary” our thoughts go towards amazingly gifted people in history. Usain Bolt, the fastest human on Earth comes to mind. As do names like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla.

All are amazing people that did extraordinary, seemingly impossible things.

Their accomplishments were at the time otherworldly, but when we look at history most of the massive changes are created by ordinary people.

Folks like you and me.

Nothing was crazy special about anything other than the accomplishment that changed the world and scope of human history.

Look no further than the Wright Brothers for a perfect example of history being changed by two seemingly ordinary and basic guys.

Orville and Wilbur came from a humble background growing up in a family with five total children. Their father was a minister—most times a traveling minister. Their mother battled sickness for years throughout their later childhood and teenage years, eventually passing away at the age of 58 due to tuberculosis. It was 14 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

History tells us they were both mechanically inclined and fascinated from an early age with avionics after their father returned from a trip and gifted them a toy helicopter. At times they would even create inventions in grade school and beyond as David McCullough points out in his book The Wright Brothers.

McCullough refers to Ida Palmer, Orville Wright’s first grade teacher to point to the ingenuity. She “would remember him at his desk tinkering with bits of wood. Asked what he was up to, he told her he was making a machine of a kind that he and his brother were going to fly someday.”

There was never formal training that later came in mechanics or engineering, no illustrious degree from a major institution.

Instead, Orville and Wilbur started a printing press before Orville finished high school. Eventually, they got into the bicycle business in the spring of 1893, opening the Wright Cycle Exchange just steps from their home at 1005 West Third Street, Dayton, Ohio.

Wilbur was prepping for a possible run at Yale around the same time, but a hockey accident left him without front teeth and severe trauma to his jaw that led him to become reclused for years.

Interestingly the stick strike to the head was at the hands of Oliver Crook Haugh. Haugh, as McCullough points out, “was executed (in 1906) for the murders of his mother, father, and brother, and was believed to have killed as many as a dozen others besides.” He was one of Ohio’s early serial killers.

Despite the severe medial setback that led to his pull from society, he dove into books and study, continuing to kindle his fascination with flight.

By 1900 the brothers had done enough self-study and investigation on previous glider and kite designs, engineering, and meteorology that they settled on Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on the Outer Banks as the perfect place for testing and eventual man-made flight.

During their years of trials leading into the first successful glider tests they studied birds intimately mocking their movements, trying to understand and decipher the art of air navigation. At one point in McCullough’s writing, he quotes a local, John Daniels, as saying “we couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts. They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, dipping.”

It was a common understanding “that man can’t fly” according to the Washington Post at the time. People thought it was a bat-shit crazy idea and the Wright’s fell into that category.

As well, McCullough points out “they had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little to no money of their own.”

Talk about haters and having every single odd stacked against you and your dreams.

Despite all this, the Wright Brothers are some of the world’s most famous set of siblings, and two of America’s greatest sons. They changed the course of human history as just ordinary dudes accomplishing EXTRA-ordinary things.

I have been in the draft room for the Jacksonville Jaguars for pick one of the NFL Draft. I have driven in cars worth the price of homes and experienced Chief Osceola plant his spear on the 50-yard line from the playing field at Florida State. I earned my Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist pin in the Navy in record time, utilizing four sleepless days to make an unrelenting push to achieve the goal. It was expected to take no less than six months to qualify once started, but with my team and shipmates—hat tip to USN Gunner’s Federico, Patten, and Gillispie—I finished in a week. Seven days.

All simply amazing and extraordinary experiences that this ordinary dude has had.

I helped grow a concept, a literal bar napkin business plan into a major player in its industry. When I departed, we were in the top .01% of products sold by volume. There are 9000+ businesses in said industry.

I’m still just an ordinary guy that helped achieve extraordinary things with other ordinary people that had EXTRA-ordinary drive and passion.

Small consistent daily activity, planning, focus, a ton of guts and a drive that is unbreakable is all it takes.

Yeah, that’s all. No bigs. Seems impossible, but re-read above, it’s not. Far from it.

It takes imagination and vision to push through the noise of haters and stick to the plan. It takes focus and drive to push through your “I cant’s” on the way to finding the “I cans” inherently built inside of you.

Be like the Wright Brothers and find the depth in your character to push yourself to be extraordinary. Become the difference, make your own history and live the extraordinary.