First, the extraordinary of ordinary people begins from not following the crowd; the mediocrity of ordinary people also begins from the crowd.
Eyal Pres's novel Beautiful Souls: Rebels in the Dark tells the story of how four ordinary people in different predicaments rebel. The first was a sheriff, who, in 1938, when countries around the world ordered countless officials like him to choose between performing their official duties and saving the innocent, he violated his duty and chose to save the innocent. The second is a Serb set in the Balkans half a century later, who crossed the national dividing line that broke the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The object of his resistance is an invisible force. The third, a soldier from an elite unit of the Israeli army who does not want to remain loyal to the army, tells the story of what happened when the core ideas and assumptions about personal identity became clear: about saying no to oneself. The fourth is a securities broker who refuses to sell a financial instrument for fear that it will pose a risk to her clients, and she has experienced a similar inner struggle, but the dilemma of this story is not that individuals have to sacrifice for the country or the collective, but that they only need to be guarded against themselves. The story revolves around saying no to greed and indifference, which may be more important in our age of being obsessed with profit than any other.
The protagonists in the story are ordinary people, and they all choose not to go with the flow in their own predicament, but choose to fight, to fight against themselves, to fight against the world, to stick to something in their hearts, or morality, or justice, or conscience.
Let me give you a more concrete example. One morning in 1942, it was hazy. Suddenly, a convoy of trucks burst in, shattering the tranquility of yuzef's village. The vehicles, from Biugorai, about 18 miles west of the village of Yuzef, carried officers and men of reserve battalion 101 of the German security police. They woke up the village's approximately 1,800 Jewish villagers who were sleeping peacefully at home and rushed outside. Villagers were taken to a market where German soldiers selected Jewish men of their age to work in concentration camps. The remaining women, children and the elderly were caught in the trucks. The trucks drove deep into the woods, and the people were forced to lie down in rows, and the German soldiers put their guns to their necks and pulled the trigger. The executions lasted from the early hours of the morning to the night. In a later interview, it was found that when these soldiers were carrying out the task of ruling the death, their commander asked that those who did not want to carry out the task could withdraw, only a few people quit the mission, and most of them chose to continue.
In that environment, it takes a lot of courage to choose to quit and stick to your inner bottom line. On the one hand, they have to face pressure from their superiors, on the other hand, they also have the doubts of their colleagues, and they are more likely to be suspected of being unpatriotic. But they opted out. It's easy to conform to the crowd, but it's easier to lose yourself.
We most likely will not face such an extreme choice. But we can still learn something different, what is not ordinary for ordinary people: stick to your heart.
Second, ordinary people are ordinary because their ideas are ordinary.
Li Xiao said that ordinary people can get wealth and freedom by writing books. Most people are discouraged by this, thinking: I can't write, I can't write, I don't have that skill. I gave up before I could do it. And only a few people will try, and then fewer people will succeed. You don't do it, you don't even have a chance to fail. When Franklin first wrote it badly, he compared it to the articles in the magazine, read it again, wrote it himself, and then compared it to where he wrote it badly. Focus, feedback, correction, and so on. Sometimes it's really not that God doesn't give you a chance, it's that you don't give yourself a chance.
Third, persist in serving the people.
It seems a bit big to say, but it's not. Everyone should be familiar with this sentence, which is the ruling purpose and core concept of the Communist Party of China. I once inadvertently bought a book called "The Journey of the Great Avenue, the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese Socialism", and at first I thought that this was just a book to publicize the Chinese Communist Party, but the more I read it, the more I deeply realized how classic the Chinese Communist Party's phrase "serving the people" really is. Whatever we do, we must create value for society and others, and if not, then we do not deserve to be rewarded. This is also the core concept of realizing our own values and pursuits.
We start a business to create value for our customers; we work to create value for our employers; we write books to create value for our readers; we live stream to create value for our fans... etcetera. In fact, the core is a sentence: serve the people.
All extraordinary things are done by ordinary people.