Film Choice:- Well, I thought I'd blog using a film for a change, and as this particular film is my all-time movie favourite, it was a simple choice to use it as a theme for today's slice of 'Coleman Philosophy'.
Quote:- 'I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary' - Angela Hayes
Yikes it's a harsh line, delivered by the two-dimensional character, Angela Hayes with a particularly venomous tongue but I wonder where the need to be extra-ordinary comes from?
I'm definitely wired that way and wonder if it does in fact come from being part of a 400 stong boy only school where 'The Bourne Identity's' own David Webb could have been trained, and where Jack Bauer would have thrived.
Thriving is a good way of describing the whole seven year experience or rather experiment. Being pitched from 1 - 30 in all subjects against your peers meant that be extraordinary was a far more desirable outcome on any school report and led to less ridicule and far more mutual respect if you were at least good at something rather than being a persistent 20+ kinda guy.
Don't get me wrong, I did get some low 20's in some subjects but a couple of 1's in more creative subjects meant that I had a relatively unscathed passage through the military styled educational process that churned out extraordinary performers on a regular yearly basis.
Knowing the rules, how to maximise their limits and working to one's full potential has led to a lot about how I see the world around me and act within it's constraints.
It's also perhaps why I react badly in situations where those constraints are imposed with superficial limitations. I often winder how would some of the folk I meet would have got through the impressionable years of 11-18 where you went in as a complete zero, a small, very small boy and came out a young man, ready to take on adulthood after being boot camped for seven long years.
Some wouldn't have lasted two minutes!
I couldn't imagine going to a school where they held a non-competitive sports day. We never actually had a sports day to compete at. Rugby, Cross Country and Cricket whether you liked them or not we're the three disciplines you were exposed to and it was Cricket, rather than Cross Country and definitely not Rugby (as that was where you got beaten up) ,where I found a niche where I could be less ordinary and stand out from the crowd.
Looking back at my 9 Guinness World Records, they obviously are part of that same philosophy. It's one I now see so often in other folk trying to make themselves a lot less ordinary in the running world. I thought I'd moved on from this island and hopped onto the next less inhabited one but I still have 25 marathons to do before I can finally leave and go to the next level of not being so ordinarily extra-ordinary.
Where does it stop? For me, who knows. For you? Well I bet you don't know either as it's just programmed into a lot of us and if you are reading my blog, you too are definitely in search-mode too.
If you find IT, please let me know so we can be far less 'Ordinary' together as there's nothing worse.
Rory Coleman - 975 Marathons - 241 Ultras - 13 Marathon des Sables - 9 Guinness World Records - 8147 Days' Alcohol Free.
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