The Radical Idea of Being Ordinary

At almost every reunion dinner in Malaysia, there is a ritual older than the food itself: the interrogation —

“So what are you doing now? Got promotion or not? XX’s daughter just became a doctor, you know?” 

We laugh about it, we brace for it, and yet almost none of us question why it exists. Somewhere along the way, we have built a culture where life is only legible if it is exceptional. Top student. Star Scholar. Youngest CEO. Viral success story. Anything less risks being translated, in the vocabulary of aunties and uncles everywhere, as failure. 

This is the quiet tyranny most of us grew up under: a consistent demand to be extraordinary, dressed up as encouragement. It starts early. SPM results day is treated less like an academic milestone than a public referendum on a teenager’s worth. Straight-A students are photographed for the newspapers; everyone else disappears from the story. University applications, scholarship interviews, LinkedIn posts about a new job or internship, all of it reinforces the same message: ordinary is what you must - all of it reinforces the same message that ordinary is the thing to escape. Kiasu culture, our famous fear of losing out, isn’t really about winning. It is about the terror of being unremarkable in a society that keeps a very public scoreboard. 

If you have ever had the sinking thought that maybe you are rather ordinary, you may have also experienced the gruelling realisation that you are not as exceptional as you once believed yourself to be. That collapse from “special” to merely “one of many” can feel strangely painful. But why should it?

The Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler offers a useful lens that blends well into the Malaysian living room. Adler argued that a person’s sense of worth should not depend upon superiority over others. Our constant striving to be special can, paradoxically, be driven by feelings of inferiority rather than genuine purpose. Beneath the ambition of the child who must top every class or the graduate who must land the most prestigious job may be a quieter fear: without these markers, would I still be worth something? 

Perhaps this is why the idea of being ordinary unsettles us so deeply. When I ponder the definition of “ordinary”, I instinctively picture being stuck in the middle of some hierarchy, or being indistinguishable, replaceable, and forgettable. We have been taught to look sideways before looking inward. Someone is doing better, so we must catch up. Someone has achieved more, so we must achieve more too. 

But being ordinary does not mean being identical to everyone else. Nor does it mean admitting defeat. We do not need to become special in order to justify being different, and we do not need to perform superiority to prove that we matter. There is freedom in being able to speak plainly about our experiences and motivations without constantly embellishing them for an audience. Ordinariness is not the absence of individuality, but the absence of our need to constantly prove it. 

That is to say, this is not a call to lower our standards or stop caring about doing things well. Freeing ourselves from other people’s expectations is not the same as giving up on life. It means listening to your own vocation instead of borrowing someone else’s definition of success. It means accepting the real, unfinished person we actually are, rather than endlessly constructing a polished version for reunion dinners and LinkedIn posts. Ambition should be something we choose because we care about what we are doing, not something we desperately pursue to avoid feeling inadequate. There is a fine difference between wanting to excel and needing to excel to feel worthy. 

We do not all need to become doctors, founders, award-winners or people whose achievements make it into the newspapers. We do not even need our lives to look remarkable from the outside. We only need to take our own tasks seriously, whatever those tasks may be, and do them with sincerity. A surgeon who operates with the same care on his hundredth patient as his first, a Grab driver who navigates flooded streets at midnight so a stranger gets home safely, or a student who quietly does their best without needing anyone to notice - all are capable of leaving an imprint far greater than the title attached to their name suggests. 

A meaningful contribution does not require an extraordinary person. Sometimes, it is simply the result of an ordinary person taking what is in front of them seriously and doing it well. 

Maybe we do not need to be special after all. Maybe it is enough to be ordinary.