When I was a kid, my grandpa told me something I didn’t really understand.

I don’t remember what we were talking about before he said it, or what I said afterward. But I remember the sentence because, somehow, it stayed with me.

He said:

“Eating, sleeping and having a family even dogs do. But as a human being, which is one of the greatest living creatures on this planet, you should do something extraordinary.”

At that age, I probably thought “extraordinary” meant becoming famous or doing something that would make everyone know my name. I was a kid. I didn’t know what else it could mean.

But the older I get, the more I think about those words.

Because what he said wasn’t really about becoming famous.

It was about not wasting the opportunity of being human.

What Makes Us Different?

Think about how strange human beings really are.

We are tiny creatures on a tiny planet, yet somehow we became curious about what exists billions of kilometres away. We looked at the night sky and didn’t just admire it. We wanted to understand it.

Then we built telescopes.

We wanted to go further, so we built rockets.

We wanted to communicate with someone on the other side of the planet, so we built telephones, computers and eventually the internet.

And none of those things existed until somebody first imagined them.

That’s what fascinates me about being human.

A bird can fly, but we looked at it and thought, “I want to fly too.”

A fish can move through water, but we didn’t just accept that we couldn’t. We built submarines.

We can’t see tiny things with our eyes, so we built microscopes.

We can’t remember everything, so we built computers to remember for us.

We encounter problems and instead of simply accepting them as part of life, we spend years trying to solve them.

We don’t just experience the world. We try to change it.

And perhaps the most incredible part is that you can have an idea in your head today that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.

You can spend the next ten years of your life turning that idea into reality.

Think about how powerful that is.

And Yet We Often Choose the Smallest Life Possible

This is where I think we become a little strange.

We have this incredible ability to imagine, create, learn and build, but a lot of us spend our lives trying not to stand out.

We worry about looking stupid.

We worry about what our friends will think.

We compare ourselves with people who seem to be doing better.

We convince ourselves that we’re not talented enough, not smart enough or not ready enough.

So we wait.

We tell ourselves we’ll start when we have more money, more confidence, more experience or more time.

And sometimes years pass without us noticing.

That’s the dangerous part about life.

Nothing dramatic has to happen for you to waste it.

You don’t have to make some terrible decision.

You can waste a life very quietly.

You can wake up, go to work, come home, watch something, scroll through your phone, sleep, and do the same thing tomorrow.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that life. A peaceful life can be a beautiful life.

But if there’s something inside you that you’ve always wanted to do and you keep burying it because you’re afraid, that’s different.

At some point, you have to ask yourself:

Am I actually living the life I want, or have I just become good at living the life that happened to me?

What If You Actually Gave It Everything?

I think most people underestimate themselves because they imagine the finished version of their dream.

Someone wants to become a great programmer and looks at someone who has been doing it for fifteen years.

Someone wants to start a company and looks at a successful founder.

Someone wants to become an artist and looks at people who have spent decades mastering their craft.

Then they look at themselves and think, “I’ll never be that good.”

Of course you aren’t.

You’re looking at their chapter twenty and comparing it to your chapter one.

What would happen if you stopped doing that?

What if you picked something you genuinely cared about and gave it five serious years?

Not five years of occasionally thinking about it.

Five years of learning, experimenting, failing, getting better and coming back to it even when it stops being exciting.

You might still fail.

You might discover that the thing you wanted wasn’t actually for you.

But you would know.

And more importantly, you would have discovered something about yourself that you could never discover by sitting on the sidelines.

You would know how far you can push yourself.

You would know what you’re capable of when you stop looking for excuses.

And that, to me, is one of the most interesting things about life.

We don’t really know what we’re capable of until we try.

Extraordinary Doesn’t Have to Mean Famous

Maybe this is where my understanding of my grandpa’s words changed the most.

Doing something extraordinary doesn’t necessarily mean changing the world.

You don’t have to become a billionaire, invent something revolutionary or have millions of people know your name.

Maybe your extraordinary thing is building something that makes thousands of people’s lives easier.

Maybe it’s becoming exceptionally good at your work.

Maybe it’s creating something beautiful.

Maybe it’s helping people who needed someone to help them.

Maybe it’s raising a family you’re proud of.

Maybe it’s becoming the person your younger self would have looked up to.

Your life doesn’t need to look extraordinary from the outside.

It needs to feel meaningful from the inside.

And I think that’s an important distinction.

Because if you’re constantly trying to impress the world, you’ll eventually lose track of what you actually wanted.

You Are Allowed to Want Something Great

There’s another thing I’ve noticed.

Sometimes we are embarrassed by how much we want something.

We say things like, “I don’t really care that much.”

We lower our expectations before anyone else can lower them for us.

Because if we don’t try seriously, then failure doesn’t hurt as much.

But what if we stopped doing that?

What if you admitted that you really do want it?

That you want the difficult job.

That you want to build the company.

That you want to become exceptional.

That you want to create something you’re proud of.

That you want to do something that people told you was unrealistic.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting something great from your life.

The important part is being willing to pay the price for it.

Because wanting something is easy.

Giving it years of your life is the real test.

You Will Fail. Do It Anyway.

If you decide to seriously pursue something, you’re going to fail.

There is no version of this story where you get everything right.

You’ll make stupid decisions.

You’ll waste time.

You’ll get rejected.

Someone will be better than you.

Something you worked on for months might completely fail.

You’ll have days when you wonder why you started.

That’s normal.

The people we admire aren’t people who avoided all of those things.

They’re people who kept moving despite them.

And sometimes persistence doesn’t look heroic at all.

Sometimes it looks like sitting down on an ordinary Tuesday and trying again.

Nobody is watching.

Nobody is cheering.

You don’t feel motivated.

You just know that you still care about the goal.

So you continue.

That’s probably what pursuing something great actually looks like most of the time.

Not some dramatic movie scene.

Just a lot of ordinary days where you choose not to quit.

We Don’t Have Forever

And then there’s the part nobody really likes thinking about.

You don’t have unlimited time.

Neither do I.

One day, there will be a last time you do everything.

A last birthday.

A last trip.

A last conversation with someone you love.

A last ordinary morning that you don’t realize is ordinary because you don’t know it’s the last one.

That’s not supposed to be depressing.

If anything, I think it’s the reason life matters.

If we had an infinite number of years, nothing would be urgent.

We could always do it tomorrow.

But we don’t.

Which means that every year you spend afraid to start is a year you can’t get back.

Every dream you postpone has a cost.

Every opportunity you refuse because you’re scared has a cost.

And sometimes the biggest cost isn’t failing.

It’s never finding out what would have happened if you had tried.

Maybe That’s What Grandpa Meant

I think I understand my grandpa’s words a little differently now.

When he said that eating, sleeping and having a family are things even dogs do, I don’t think he was saying those things aren’t valuable.

They are.

They’re some of the most beautiful parts of life.

I think he was pointing at something beyond them.

Surviving isn’t the same thing as using your potential.

You were given a mind that can imagine things that don’t exist.

You were given the ability to learn from people you have never met.

You can take an idea from inside your head and turn it into something another person can see, use or experience.

You can fail at something and decide to try again.

You can decide what kind of person you want to become.

You can spend years becoming better at something simply because you care about it.

That’s an extraordinary thing to be able to do.

So maybe the question isn’t:

“How successful will I become?”

Maybe it’s something much more personal.

“What am I going to do with this life?”

Final Thoughts

I don’t think everyone needs to chase some enormous dream.

I don’t think life is about being productive every minute or turning yourself into some perfect version of a human being.

Sometimes life is just sitting with your parents.

Sometimes it’s travelling somewhere you’ve never been.

Sometimes it’s falling in love, laughing with your friends, eating good food or doing absolutely nothing on a Sunday afternoon.

Those moments matter.

But I also think there’s something sad about reaching the end of your life and realizing you spent most of it afraid to find out what you could have become.

So if there’s something you really care about, give it a real chance.

Not because anyone can promise you that you’ll succeed.

Nobody can.

Give it everything because you might surprise yourself.

You might fail.

You might change your mind.

You might have to start over.

But you might also discover that you were capable of much more than you thought.

And maybe that’s what makes life so exciting.

We don’t get to see the final version of ourselves.

We have to build that person along the way.

Years from now, I don’t want to look back and think about all the things I could have done if I had been less afraid.

I want to look back and know that I tried.

That I cared about something enough to struggle for it.

That I took my chances.

That I built things.

That I learned.

That I failed and kept going.

That I didn’t always choose the easy path.

And most importantly, that I didn’t waste the opportunity my grandpa reminded me about when I was just a kid.

We get one life.

Make it yours.

And whatever you decide to do with it…

don’t let your life become ordinary.