Ordinary genius

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” - Napoleon

It just struck me the other day that the word ‘extraordinary’ is in fact made up of ’extra’ and ‘ordinary’. The person who is ‘extraordinary’ or ‘the genius’ as Napoleon puts it, is a person excessively grounded in the ordinary.

A grounding that roots him. The persistence of an unwavering mind, constantly progressing in the thing that it believes to be pursued, is capable of taking something ordinary to special heights.

Its not easy though, self-belief intertwined with self-love and patience are not abundant commodities in this day and age. Thats what makes it special

Task Happy

There is a specific and intense joy of belonging to the task that one is doing. Probably there is no other way to enjoy any task than knowing that nothing more is important at this moment to do.

Often times our joys are sucked out by parallel tasks running in our mind. I’m dropping my brother off but I‘d rather have spent a slow early morning in bed. I’m sitting here writing a story but that e-mail is more important to be sent. I’m spending my afternoons cooking, instead of giving that extra bit of time my work needs me on. So on and so forth. Recipes of deep unhappiness.

This is the reason slotting of time matters the most. Knowing that nothing else needs priority than the task at hand. Knowing that everything has been given its due share of time. This is what allows for tasks to be fun, this is what allows for flow to happen! Your hourly calendar is a tool that can bring sustained joy!

Forgetting through sleep

Forgetting is the price we pay for remembering - Matthew Walker ( Why we Sleep)

An interesting aspect of sleep that I always intuitively knew but recently read more into was forgetting.

Matt Walker says:

the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing craving in addiction disorders). Moreover, forgetting is not just beneficial to delete stored information we no longer need. It also lowers the brain resources required for retrieving those memories we want to retain, similar to the ease of finding important documents on a neatly organized, clutter-free desk. In this way, sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection.

I’ve been experimenting with playing the guitar these days. I’ve realized practicing late in the night and first thing in the morning actually shows how much of wrong motor-skills that you can’t get rid of consciously are binned over a night’s sleep. Maybe there is somewhere also an incessant tagging in the brain for an action to be marked ‘undesired’. The brain keeps count and shoves it away into the darker areas never to be found.